


Five Meetings of the Nightmare Club

by redjacket



Series: The Nightmare Club [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Plague, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Starvation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:00:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26549392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redjacket/pseuds/redjacket
Summary: Sequel toThe Nightmare Club.Nile didn't think she could belong to a weirder, more selective group then the Old Guard. But being immortal doesn't mean you stop having nightmares.When that happens, the Nightmare Club meets to play cards.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova & Quynh | Noriko, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Nile Freeman & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova
Series: The Nightmare Club [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1899955
Comments: 35
Kudos: 207





	1. the soundless wailing

**Author's Note:**

> If there are warnings for any chapters, I'll do a brief one up top but there will be more details in the End Notes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for discussion of starvation and child harm/death.

Nile gasped awake alone in a room with little more than a bed, chair and peeling wallpaper. There had been a lamp on the chair originally but she had moved it in favour of stacking her clothes there. 

She stared up at the ceiling, the cracks that spider webbed above her. 

(Joe had made faces when he had shown her the room, apologized and said they hadn’t stayed there for 40 years but, hey, at least they had electricity and their own rooms at this one. 

They hadn’t at the last but the beauty of it, ancient and carved into a cliff face, with a waterfall below, had made up for it.)

Somewhere, somewhere a woman woke up and screamed and screamed and screamed and drowned again. 

Nile had been scared of the water when she was little. They didn’t live particularly close to Lake Michigan and most of the time she could forget about it being there, just a dark blue, looming in the distance. Her first memories of seeing it up close were from winter, when the Lake was at its angriest and darkest. Just thinking about the Lake on a stormy winter morning could make her shiver. 

But her dad was adamant. She had to learn to swim. It was important, he said, her and her brother had to learn water safety. He didn’t want any children of his drowning because of the legacy _those people_ had left them. 

(She wondered what her dad would say about her drowning in her dreams so often.)

Nile didn’t understand it when she was five; she did by the time she was seven. Her mother’s family was from the South — her grandparents had come North after her grandpa served in Vietnam - but it wasn’t like Illinois had been kinder when it came to sharing its public pools. 

(There were pictures on Copley’s wall of Nicky and Andy jumping into a pool as a man poured bleach into it to pull out Black boys and girls — children — who knew they should be allowed to swim too. 

Nile knew that the reason Joe wasn’t in those photos was because if he had done that he would probably have been shot.) 

Her father had been the first person in her family who learned how to swim. He taught her. He taught her brother. He had taught her mom, back when they were first dating, but she never liked the water much.

Nile couldn’t say she was a great swimmer but she was good enough to finish all the lessons offered at the rundown community pool. She thought about taking the training to become a lifeguard when she was old enough — it was a city job and paid pretty well for not doing much _most_ of the time - but then her dad died and she stopped. She didn’t get in the water for nearly five years, until a couple of her work friends dragged her to North Avenue Beach. When she wouldn’t get in the water, a white boy one of them knew told them to leave her alone because: “Everyone knows Black people can’t swim,” and she marched into the water to dunk him under the waves and prove him wrong. 

(Lake Michigan had been cold that day but Nile had stayed in for hours. She made herself get in the Lake at least once a year after that, until she shipped out. She respected it — it still looked so cold and cruel in the winter — but you could give something the respect it deserved and still not let the fear of it keep a hold of you.)

She hadn’t been near a lake big enough to be considered _Great_ since she became immortal. They had been near the ocean in coastal cities for a couple missions, but never with enough time to hit the beach. 

She wondered if walking into that dark, deep water would be different now that she knew what it felt like to drown secondhand. 

(They had swum at the last safe house in the waterfall’s pool. Her and Nicky and Joe. There was a path down carved in the side of the cliff too, if you knew where to look for it, and they climbed down. But that water had been clear, except under the roar of the waterfall, and she could see the rocks beneath her feet the whole time. 

None of them had had bathing suits and Nile hadn’t hesitated before stripping down to her underwear, not with them, until Nicky had glanced over at Joe, then her, and asked if she was okay with them swimming nude. 

Joe — already naked when Nicky asked — had hastily pulled his underwear back on. It made joy bubble in her chest, because Nicky had asked, because Joe was that comfortable with her _already_ that he hadn’t thought to _._ She had laughed, thought _fuck it_ , and taken hers off too. 

Nicky smiled and Joe laughed, telling her, as he waded into the brisk water: “Nicky used to blush and make faces at seeing a woman naked. He wrinkled his nose at _Andy_ when she first stripped in front of him.”

Nicky balled up Joe’s own underwear and threw it at him while Joe protested and pouted as it landed in the water. 

“Not a fan of women, huh?” Nile asked, swimming far enough away that she was out of their splash zone. 

“It is simply that most do not have a form that holds attraction for me,” Nicky told her. “And I was not accustomed to it.”

He let Joe’s underwear drop onto the rocks with a splat and finally came marching into the water himself. He went all the way in in one go, ducking his head underneath at the deepest point and then coming up to float on his back.

Nile couldn’t touch the bottom and keep her head above water at the deepest point of the pool but there was nowhere Nicky and Joe couldn’t find a firm foothold. Joe mostly kept his head above water, like Nile did, but Nicky clearly took to the water like he had been born to it. 

Nile said as much and Joe had grinned as Nicky ducked his head beneath the water again. 

“He was like that when I met him. If he had not been a priest they would have had to consider him a witch,” Joe said, teasing. Nile’s head whipped around. “Europeans in those days didn’t believe much in swimming. Or bathing. This one,” he jerked a thumb in Nicky’s direction, “he had swum in the sea but you would not believe how I had to plead with him to get him to go to the baths the first few years.”

That was...gross, when Nile thought about it. But it wasn’t why she was staring at Nicky with disbelieving eyes. 

“You were a _priest_?” she asked. Demanded. She wasn’t sure. 

Nicky looked surprised but nodded. “I was.”

“Hey, is that a snake?” Joe said. 

Nile did not think. Nicky was closest to her and farthest away from Joe and the snake. In the next moment, she had put him between her and Joe and the snake. She also clamoured onto his back, her hands digging into his shoulders. 

Joe was trying not to laugh. “It’s not — Nile, it’s not poisonous. It’s only little. It’s fine! I promise.”

“It cannot hurt you,” Nicky said, quiet and calm. Because he was a good person who wasn’t even commenting on the fact that she was half strangling him. 

“I hate snakes,” Nile told him.

Nicky put his hand over hers. Nile let her head thunk against the back of his for a moment. She could deal with snakes when she expected them to be here because, yeah, it was basically a phobia but she was a _Marine_ and as soon as her teammates sensed weakness they had put plastic snakes in her bed for _months_. 

But this was just supposed to be _nice._

“Joe!” Nicky called but Joe was already up on the rocks and shooing the snake away.

“It’s gone,” Joe replied, waving at them. 

Nile didn’t budge, still wrapped around Nicky in the middle of the pool. She wanted to and didn’t want to ask him to _check_ but she also didn’t want to move in case there were more. 

She didn’t have to. Joe was already walking around the edges to check and Nicky was turning in the water so Nile could watch him. 

“You know,” Nicky said, quietly, warm and solid for her to cling to. “Sometimes I do not think I was a very good priest.” 

Nile wasn’t sure about that. She wanted to ask him about it but Joe was splashing back into the water and she was starting to feel more silly than scared so she let go of him. He still stayed close, even as Joe came over and hovered next to Nicky’s side for a moment, leaning in to kiss his cheek. 

“C’mon Nile,” Joe said, pushing away from Nicky. “You have not gone behind the waterfall yet. I chased all the snakes away. Nicky can help you find your footing.”

It had been something she had never imagined, holding Nicky’s hand as they ducked beneath the waterfall, the way it pounded against her back and the roar of it slapping on the rocks and water as they sat behind the waterfall. The pure wonder of it made Nile laugh in delight - Joe quickly joining her and Nicky smiling, big and bright.) 

She closed her eyes and took a breath, held it. She imagined standing at the edge of Lake Michigan and watching a Winter storm roll in. She tried to imagine striding into the waves now that she could even though it would hurt.

(She thought of Booker, standing alone at the edge of the Thames. 

She thought of Quynh screaming and screaming and _screaming_ as the water flooded her lungs.) 

Nile opened her eyes and stared at the flaws in the off-white ceiling above her. 

She got up.

There was a light on at the end of the hallway. She still tried to tiptoe down it even though she knew Joe wouldn’t wake up and if Andy was going to, she already had. 

Nicky, of course, was in the kitchen already. He was pulling a mug from the cupboard when she reached the open doorway and he didn’t need to turn to know she was there. The kettle was already on. 

“Tea or hot chocolate?” He asked.

Nile sighed. “Do we have any camomile?” 

She could only see part of Nicky’s face but she saw it crease at the thought of disappointing her. “No, sadly. I’m having ginger.”

Nile frowned. “You okay?”

(Booker had told her, stilted and unsure and unlike how Nile thought of him, that Nicky’s nightmares were sometimes so bad it upset his stomach.

He hadn’t answered when she asked if the same thing happened to him.)

“I’m fine,” Nicky said. “It is all we have left here. It is a bit...”

Nile wrinkled her nose. “Stale?”

“Downright dusty,” Nicky told her in a flat tone. Nile snorted. It made Nicky smile a little. “Joe picked up the hot chocolate earlier today.” 

“I’m sold,” Nile said. She gave him a pointed look. “Are _you_ going to keep drinking dusty tea?” 

Nicky huffed a laugh and put his mug in the sink before reaching for another. He turned and gave her a bigger smile as they waited for the kettle to boil. “Satisfied?” 

“Yes,” Nile said because she was. Nicky did things out of habit, or because of other people’s habits, sometimes, even if it wasn’t his preference. It bothered her a little. 

She knew Joe was super aware of it. He pestered Nicky about it. 

They were quiet together as Nicky finished making the hot chocolate and handed Nile hers. It was okay, he did something that made it better than most powder mixes, but her mom had made awesome hot chocolate and it wasn’t the same. 

“Do you want to play cards still?” Nile asked. She had spotted a book on the counter and the lights weren’t on in the common room. 

But Nicky just said: “Sure,” and followed her. 

They played a few rounds of scopa — Nile had looked it up in the hopes Nicky would be better at it: he wasn't — before Nicky offered: “We can play something else if you would like.”

“You’re just as bad at every other card game I know,” Nile said, without looking up from her hand.

“No. I meant Scrabble or chess or something of the like,” Nicky clarified. “I am just used to cards. We do not have to play it, if there is something else you prefer.” 

Nile’s mind went nearly blank with possibilities for a moment. She desperately wanted to play Jenga but with Andy and Joe too. They would be so competitive, it would be _hilarious_. 

Nicky chuckled at the look on her face. “I think we only have chess and dominoes here but we can purchase some board games.”

Pictionary. She was going to make them play Pictionary. They would have to draw straws for Joe’s team. Or maybe she and Joe would gang up against both of them. 

“We are totally going to do that,” Nile told him — enjoying the way it made Nicky smile. “Cards are fine for tonight. I might try going back to sleep in awhile.” 

Nicky nodded. He waited a few more hands before speaking again. Nile liked that. She liked that he didn’t have to keep the chatter up, that they could sit together quietly, but that he never seemed to mind when she needed to talk. Joe didn’t either — they would answer her questions endlessly no matter what the situation.

(The only exception was when on mission, when they were going in somewhere or when Nicky was set up as their sniper.

So much about his personality had suddenly made sense to Nile when she found out Nicky was their sniper.) 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Nicky asked quietly. 

Nile sighed. She looked at his face when she answered and Nicky looked back, meeting her eyes in that too-direct way of his: “It was Quynh.” 

“Ah,” Nicky said. He didn’t flinch. He never did. Nile thought she would have stopped telling him if he flinched. Sometimes, when he and Joe spoke of Quynh — always, always away from Andy — their eyes went a bit distant, sometimes a bit teary but they never shied away from it. 

“Can you tell me more about her?” Nile asked. Nicky looked a little surprised. “You all clearly love her so much and I only dream of her drowning.”

Nicky thought for a moment before his eyes went soft and impossibly fond. He smiled a little before saying: “Once when we were travelling through what is now Germany, she fed a starving dog and he would not leave her side until the day he died.”

It was so unexpected that Nile giggled in delight. “Seriously?”

“Oh yes, when she found him, he was more than half dead and had lost half his ear and tail but Quynh called him Schee,” Nicky said. “She came marching back into camp with him one day. Andy complained and complained because of the fleas but Quynh would not hear it. We had to set up a new shelter because she would not sleep away from Schee until he was well again.” 

“What kind of dog was he?” Nile asked, trying to picture it. Joe had shown her a few sketches of Quynh. The flashes she saw of her were so vague and blurred sometimes it was hard to believe it was the same person.

“Hound dog. Smart. Very loyal,” Nicky told her. Nile’s face most have shown how hungry she was for information because Nicky continued. “He was brown with a darker head and ears and sleek fur. Not large but not like a lap dog.”

“He made finding dinner much easier than it had been. He went hunting with me and he came to like us all, I think,” Nicky smiled. “But his joy was Quynh. Quynh had him trained to retrieve her arrows and to dart away from the horses in battle.”

“She took him in to battle with her?” Nile said, unsure if she was appalled or awed.

“Oh yes. She tried not to at first but Schee would not be left behind,” Nicky told her. He smiled in remembrance. “He was a brave one. He once bit Andy when he mistook their actions for fighting.”

Nile laughed out loud. Nicky grinned. “Andy was furious. Quynh threw her out of their bed to comfort Schee.”

“You are making that up,” Nile accused. 

Nicky solemnly put his hand over his heart. “I swear it. Ask Joe. Ask _Andy.”_

“Oh absolutely not,” Nile said. “Where did Schee bite her?”

Nicky grinned mischievously and said nothing. Nile slapped his arm. “You _have_ to tell me.”

“I will only say that her bottom was still bare when she left their tent,” Nicky said almost primly.

“He bit her in the ass.” Nile declared. Nicky grinned. “He did not!”

“It was early in our time with Schee. Andy spent many days befriending him after that. It never happened again,” Nicky said.

It was hard to picture them with a dog, Quynh with a dog. For someone whose death Nile knew more intimately than even her own, Nile didn’t have a very good image of Quynh in her head despite Joe’s efforts.

It made her sad. “What happened to him?”

“There was grey in his muzzle when Quynh found him,” Nicky said. “But he was still with us for five years and very spry for almost all of that time. The last few months, Quynh would not go into battle because she would not risk him. We were in Greece when he lay down to take a nap at Quynh’s side and did not wake again.”

Nile didn’t feel as sad as she had expected hearing that. It helped that Nicky’s eyes held such utter fondness for the dog, for the memories of him and Quynh. It was still there when he looked back at her in that too direct way of his, like he could see everything everyone tried to keep hidden. 

He smiled kindly at her and said: “You can tell me if you wish. Or I can tell you another story of her.”

Nile took a breath. Her dreams of Quynh drowning were horrifying and terrifying and quick and sharp. They always woke her and she didn’t know how to reconcile how Quynh felt, drowning for half a millennia, with the woman Nicky, Joe and Andy clearly still missed and longed for but...

This was the part that was really troubling her. 

“It’s the same,” Nile told him. “She’s still drowning. She’s still fighting it _every_ single moment. She still feels...like she would tear the world apart if she could. Nothing feels different than the last time and I...”

Nicky waited patiently. His eyes were so kind when he looked at her and she knew he _wouldn’t_ make her say it if she didn’t want to. For Nile, though, that just made it more important that she did. 

“I’m getting used to them, I think,” Nile said softly. “And I _hate_ that.”

Nicky’s face stayed calm. “It would be a torment if you did not.”

“But what kind of person am I if dreaming of someone drowning doesn’t upset me?” Nile asked. It came out more choked than she expected.

Nicky dropped his cards — face up and he had the _worst_ hand again, the _worst_ luck — and took her hand. He looked straight at her, so earnest about it it was impossible to look away. 

“You are a good person, Nile,” Nicky told her firmly. He put his other hand over both of theirs and squeezed. “That is a choice you make everyday. We all see it.”

Nile bit the inside of her cheek. She never knew what to say, when Nicky or Joe said stuff like that to her. She tried, she knew she did, and with the way they said it disagreeing felt wrong. 

But people reacted funny when you said: “Thank you,” or “I know,” to stuff like that.

“I would not say it is easy but for me, there is something similar. It is _easier_ when my nightmares are of the suffering of others, those I do not know, rather than my own suffering. Even after all this time,” Nicky admitted. “And that brings guilt with it too. None of it is easy or right.”

Nile didn’t know if she felt better for not being alone with that feeling or worse to know Nicky had experienced it. 

“Which was it for you tonight?” she asked. She honestly did not know what answer she hoped to hear.

Nicky smiled as grimly as Nile had ever seen but not, she suspected, as grimly as he could. He still _mostly_ didn’t talk about his own dreams but he was starting to let her in a little. “Both.” 

“Fuck,” Nile said, and then added, half-reflexively and half because someone _should_ say it, Nicky didn’t deserve this bullshit anymore than she did. “I’m sorry.”

Nicky blinked and squeezed her hand again before letting it go. “Thank you. That is kind of you.” 

Nile smiled, glad she said it. They played a few more hands — it was a good habit he had started, Nile thought, because playing cards like this was almost thoughtless but took just enough to let things settle — before Nicky asked, tentatively: “Have you spoken to Booker about this?”

Nile frowned a little. Nicky was careful to avoid asking about any conversations she had with Booker that he wasn’t present for, though he was present for basically all of them. 

(After her first Nightmare Club meeting, Andy had pulled her aside one day and told her: “If Booker can help you with something we can’t, fuck it. Just don’t tell him where we are.”

And then while Joe was teaching her how to make blintzes — “Andy and Nicky go crazy for them.” — he told her he was okay with it too so long as Booker couldn’t trace them through her. 

“He knows all of our safe houses, unless I have forgotten some,” Joe told her with a tight smile. “So it is already easy enough for him if that is what he wishes.”

Nile had watched Nicky and Andy place trip wires at the entrance of their last safe house. She didn’t agree with Booker’s punishment but she wasn’t denying the hurt he had caused them. It was all too clear in the tense line of Joe’s shoulders and the twist of Andy’s mouth and the quiet ways Nicky held himself back when they played cards.

“He won’t find us from me,” Nile had promised and watched Joe relax by inches even as he smiled, his fingers sticky with berries and dough.)

“I’ve talked to him about the dreams,” Nile said. “But not this part of it.”

Nicky nodded. “He has suffered from dreams of Quynh dying for too long a time. He can give you insights that I do not have.”

“Did you email him?” Nile asked. That was how it worked, whoever was up first — Nicky, it was always Nicky — emailed Booker, just a short line to say they were awake. If Booker was too, he would call them. 

Nicky nodded; Nile frowned. “When?” 

She hadn’t seen Nicky use the laptop since she had been up and he hadn’t taken his phone out of his pocket. 

“I emailed him that I was awake when I knew I would not be able to get back to sleep,” Nicky told her. “That was...perhaps an hour before you awoke?”

Nile was aware that Nicky was often getting up because _she_ was when he could have just gone back to sleep. And she knew sometimes he was getting up with her when he didn’t have nightmares at all because he _always_ woke up if someone in the house got up in the night.

Tonight was not one of those nights. 

(Nile was pretty sure Nicky had more nightmares than her. In the direct aftermath of something — her first death, a bad mission — she would have them for a couple nights, then once or twice a week for maybe a month and then they just sort of petered out and only came back to surprise her awake occasionally.

The dreams of Quynh were...inconsistent. She wouldn’t have any for months, then there would be two in one week. 

Tonight’s drowning nightmare was the first one she had had in six weeks. 

That made getting used to them worse somehow. It’s not like she had them _every_ night.)

“He may be asleep,” Nicky offered. “But I do not think it would hurt for you to try emailing him.” 

Nile frowned. “Why?”

Nicky hummed, clearly weighing his words. “You did not seem troubled tonight when I woke. Often, I can tell if we will need a meeting. Tonight, I thought you were unlikely to wake.”

Nile still didn’t understand. “So?”

Nicky looked vaguely embarrassed. “Before, I have emailed Booker that _we_ are awake. Tonight I only told him _I_ was.” 

Nile blinked. It took her a moment to understand what Nicky was telling her. That Booker was only showing up for her. That when it was Nicky he wasn’t. That he wouldn’t for whatever reason. And for a moment Nile was so disappointed and angry she didn’t want to email Booker. She didn’t want to confirm that if it was true. She knew, she _knew_ , that this whole thing was a big concession from Nicky and Joe and even Andy, even if they were going out of their way to make her feel like it wasn’t, to make things better for her as much as they could.

And besides that, _she_ hadn’t been Nicky’s friend for over 200 years. He had only sat up playing cards with her for a few months and maybe Booker was trying to be unobtrusive or give him space or whatever but it felt like a slap in the face if Nicky was reaching out and Booker was ignoring it. 

“Nile,” Nicky said gently, reading her expression. “He may be asleep. I woke early tonight.”

“You don’t think that,” Nile said flatly. 

Nicky shrugged. “I do not know if you have noticed but you and Booker seem to dream of Quynh on the same nights.”

Nile stared at him for a moment, realizing that, yes, that was true. Then she gave Nicky a look because she was pretty good at seeing through people’s bullshit and she could tell he was giving her an out if she didn’t want to believe that of Booker. As if the drowning dreams didn’t wake them both up _fast_. As if they hadn’t been sitting up for over an hour now. 

Nicky’s expression hardly changed — if you didn’t know him he usually looked pretty placid, sometimes unnervingly so. But Nile had been watching. She knew the fast track to figuring out Nicky’s microexpressions was through Joe, who sometimes reacted to Nicky’s forehead smoothing out as if Nicky had just waggled his eyebrows and made a lewd comment because that _was_ what he was doing, just the Nicky version of it. Joe might know Nicky better than _Nicky_ knew Nicky so Nile took her cues from him, watching _Joe_ to learn what the tiny curve of Nicky’s lips on the left meant versus what the right meant. 

She thought she would be more pleased when that paid off for her, when she looked at Nicky’s not-really-blank face and could tell he didn’t _really_ regret mentioning his suspicions but that he was sorry he had to. 

And that...he hoped he was wrong. Nile ached for that little piece of hope she could read in the tiny bit of tension around his eyes. He wanted Booker to prove him wrong.

Nicky held his hands up, caught out and knowing it. He sighed. “It is not an obligation to attend Nightmare Club, even if we are both awake. I have told you that for some of mine I will only turn to Joe. And Booker and I...we have things to say to each other that make it hard for him to accept that comfort when it is only me.”

“Why doesn’t he just say them then?” Nile groused. 

Nicky’s tiny smile was kind and patient and very sad. “He is not ready for that yet. But I suspect that he will want to be there for you.”

Nile still hesitated. Nicky took her hand again, just briefly, and squeezed once. “Booker and I, we will work things out between us in time. I believe that. But he has to be ready to have those conversations. As do I."

“What lies between us, though, is no fault of yours and neither of us would wish it to harm you,” Nicky said, and continued when she would have protested, “Even if that harm is the absence of support you could benefit from. I have never had to experience her deaths as you have. Nor will I. That is something only the two of you share and none of us would deny you that.” 

Nile swallowed. “It’s still my choice, though.”

Nicky nodded. “It is. And it is _his_ if he decided to roll over and go back to sleep tonight. Or if he had other entertainment we do not know of.”

Nile raised an eyebrow at that. Nicky looked back at her squarely. “Booker has been no more celibate than I for the last 200 years. And at some point in the future he will be appalled to know you thought otherwise.”

“Ew,” Nile said but she laughed, pulled out her phone and sent Booker a quick email. “You know, I wouldn’t have pegged you as the one who was so upfront about sex.”

Nicky was unrepentant. “I have had 900 years to overcome my hang outs.”

“Ups,” Nile corrected absently because Nicky had asked her too — he disliked English idioms and he was always mixing them up.

“Ups, yes, thank you,” Nicky said, adding under his breath. “Horrible language.” 

“Your Italian is so old and dead Andy doesn’t even want me to learn it,” Nile replied with a grin. The teasing had become familiar and comfortable so quickly. 

Nicky said something that Nile recognized was not actually Italian but related to it. She looked at him, unimpressed. He smirked at her and said something to her in actual Italian that she caught maybe two words of.

“I may be a baby to you right now,” Nile said. “But I’ll know more languages than you in another hundred years, I guarantee it,” she took a sip of her now cold chocolate, “You’re so old you’re probably already forgetting some of yours.”

Nicky laughed, a real one. He was always so delighted when she teased him. 

She was still smiling from that when her phone buzzed on the table. They both looked at it almost involuntarily. Nile felt something sour settle in her stomach but Nicky’s expression was nothing but kind and he gestured for her to check it.

She picked it up. “Booker’s awake.”

Nicky just nodded. “We can call him.”

Nile still felt bullish about it. “What if I don’t want to?”

If Nicky was bothered, Nile couldn’t read it in his expression. “Then we do not have to call him.”

Nile worried at her bottom lip for a moment before grabbing the laptop and opening the secure program Copley had arranged for them. She kept half an eye on Nicky; he still looked completely unperturbed. 

Booker picked up on the first ring. He looked tired, Nile thought, though he smiled a little when he saw her. Maybe he had actually been sleeping. 

“Hey Nile. Nicky,” Booker greeted. He smiled and it didn’t seem strained but something was a little off. Nile couldn’t put her finger on what. “What are we playing tonight?” 

“We were playing scopa,” Nile said. “But Nicky also sucks at it.” 

“And so there is one consistent thing in the world,” Booker said. 

Nicky smiled one of his tiny smiles but stayed silent. Booker leaned out of frame for a moment and Nile heard something thunk onto the table but out of view before he leaned back. Nicky looked at the cards for the first time in probably half an hour, picking them up and shuffling again. 

“You okay, Nile?” Booker asked, genuine concern in his voice. 

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Nile told him. “I dreamt of Quynh again.”

“Ah,” Booker said. His smile was grim. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” Nile said. “I wanted to ask—”

Nile paused. Nicky had understood but like he had said he didn’t dream of Quynh drowning. What if Booker did more than her? What if he felt every dream like it was the first? 

“It’s okay, Nile,” Booker said as gentle as Nicky. “You can always ask me.”

Nicky nudged her foot under the table in support. It didn’t make a sound but Booker still chose that moment to look at him and frown just a little.

“Did you—” Nile cleared her throat. “Did you get used to them?”

Booker frowned. It made Nile’s gut clench for a moment but it wasn’t judgmental. She could see that. He just looked confused. 

“Used to them?” He repeated. 

“It’s like. It’s not as _sharp_ as the first time. Because it’s the same. It’s — I hate saying this — it’s always the same. It’s so repetitive,” Nile managed to get out. Nicky put his hand on her knee and squeezed in support. “I think I’m getting used to them.” 

“Oh,” Booker said. He ran a hand through his hair. “I. Yeah, I think so. I haven’t really thought about it.”

For some reason, that made Nile relax a little. Booker was nodding, his forehead creased by a frown, thinking it through. “Yeah. When we first dreamed of you, I felt you die and it was...”

He exhaled. “I woke up and it felt like my own throat had been cut. It’s not like that with her anymore. It’s not as vivid.” 

Nile had never asked what it felt like when they first dreamed of her. She leaned forward closer to the screen. “I’m sorry.”

Booker waved the apology away. He leaned out of the screen again, then back in. He rubbed his fingers over his mouth. 

“We would go mad if it didn’t feel...less after a while, I think,” Booker said, almost off hand. 

“Yeah,” Nile agreed. She had to suppress a shiver; Quynh felt mad in all senses of the word. “I’m glad it’s not only me.”

“It’s not,” Booker assured her. He laughed but it wasn’t — Nile thought there was something funny about it. “You’re not alone, Nile.” 

“Is that what your nightmare was tonight?” she asked, searching for something to say. 

“Ah,” Booker seemed caught out for a moment. “I might have dreamed of her. That’s not — it didn’t wake me. That’s not why I’m awake.” 

“Nicky thought we might dream of her at the same time,” Nile said. 

“He did, huh,” Booker said, his tone flat and unlike him.

“We all dreamt of you on the same nights,” Nicky told him. “Until we found you.” 

“Huh,” Booker said, extremely dryly. “Lucky me.”

Nile frowned. She thought about saying something even as Nicky leaned forward, his eyes intent on Booker.

“Are you all right Book?” Nicky asked carefully.

Booker laughed. He leaned out of frame again. There was a clink before he leaned back in. 

_Oh,_ Nile thought. He was drinking. Hard. He didn’t want them to see. 

“I’m fine,” Booker said dismissively. 

Nicky’s face was blank but carefully so now. He let it lie, asking instead. “What would you like to play?” 

“Nile’s choice,” Booker said brusquely. 

“Let’s just keep playing scopa,” Nile suggested. "Since I just learned it."

Neither of them objected. Nicky dealt the cards silently. They hadn’t settled on a good way for Booker to play on the computer while they played with cards so Nicky held his cards up for him again. Nile thought about suggesting they play Scrabble or something but she didn’t want to upset what suddenly felt like a fragile truce. 

She regretted that. 

Booker kept leaning off screen to drink and not acknowledging it which, _fine_ Nile thought, _if that’s the way he wants to play it._ She hadn’t been able to tell at first glance. He was maybe a little hazy, a little more prone to mumbling his words together and slipping into a dialect that wasn’t all the way French but if Nile hadn’t been looking she wouldn’t have seen it. He was still kind with her, making bad jokes when she was dealt a bad hand and smiling at her genuinely, his eyes crinkling just a little.

He wasn’t the same with Nicky. He was short with him and snapped at Nicky as he played Booker’s hand for him where he had joked before. Nicky bore it stoically — he mostly just let Nile and Booker talk — but that only seemed to spur Booker on. His drinking picked up and his words veered from being short tempered to mean. 

Nile quickly had enough. She suspected Nicky would have put an end to things already if Booker wasn’t still being kind to her, if she hadn’t actually been able to talk to him a little about dreaming of Quynh. But they were passed that now and this clearly wasn’t good for Booker either.

She put her cards down on the table before Nicky could deal a new hand. “I might try to go back to sleep.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Booker agreed but he was filling his glass again. He had let his bottle drift into view about twenty minutes ago. Nile had glanced at Nicky then but he had kept as still and calm as the Lake on a clear, windless day. 

“Unless,” Booker continued, his tone suddenly cutting. “Nicky wants to grace us with the details of his nightmare. Since we all know he doesn’t dream of Quynh.”

Nile half-flinched. Mostly because that was a low blow and they all knew it but also because neither of them had asked Nicky about why he was up, not really. She looked at him, sorry that the night had come to this, expecting him to deflect. 

Booker noticed immediately, of course, and his face dropped as if he had snapped out of it or sobered up. 

“I’m sor—” Booker began. 

“I dreamed of Lyon in ‘48,” Nicky replied.

It stopped Booker short. He stared at Nicky through the screen. 

There was silence. 

“What happened in Lyon in ‘48?” Nile asked cautiously when nothing more was said. She half dreaded the answer and knew better than to guess at the century now.

Nicky looked at her and she could tell he was weighing whether or not to tell her. Booker must have already understood the reference; his face was ashen. Even if it had been before his time, they had several lifetimes of Nightmare Club meetings without her. It was _Nile_ that Nicky was reluctant to share his nightmares with.

Nile met his gaze squarely. He still rarely spoke of his nightmares with her, though he was always, always willing to listen to hers. Nile got it, she did, but at some point that was going to have to change. She understood that they thought of her as young, that they wanted to protect her, but it wasn’t going to work for her long term if Nicky was always comforting her and she wasn’t giving any back to him. 

“Plague house,” Nicky said finally as if the words were being dragged out of him. “It had been a makeshift orphanage for children whose parents had already died of it. Joe and I made sure we were inside when it was boarded up. The priest had fled and the nun who had been their caretaker had died.”

He stopped speaking again. He was still looking at her, his face so still. Booker shifted on the screen so many countries away. 

“How long were you in there for?” Nile asked. She could see it was hard for him. If he needed questions to get it out, she could do that. 

“Thirty-five days,” Nicky told her. He took a breath and then it seemed to come easier for a moment. “At night, Andy and Quynh would shoot an arrow to an upstairs window Joe could open a crack. It was how we kept the children fed.”

“How many times did you starve to death?” Booker asked so harshly that Nile had to keep herself from flinching again. She gave him a look; it seemed to surprise him coming from her.

She was equally surprised that she saw as much _worry_ on his face as anger but she couldn’t tell if it was for her — that he had decided she shouldn’t have to hear this — or if it was the same ache she felt for Nicky. 

There was a coldness in Nicky’s eyes when he looked at Booker and a sudden stiffness in his posture. “I did not count. It did not matter.” 

Booker might have made a soft sound but Nile couldn’t be sure. 

“If Andy and Quynh were getting food to you...” Nile started but Nicky shook his head. 

“We saved it for the children,” Nicky told her. Nile noticed that his posture relaxed a little when he was focussed on her. “Those that were ill were downstairs with me. Those that were well we kept upstairs with Joe. We did not see each other so that we would not spread it to the children who were not sick but...” 

Nicky sighed and shook his head. “It was the plague. Joe slowly shut off rooms as more of them became ill, trying to save those he could. I would hear him moving around upstairs only and perhaps catch a glimpse of him when he dropped food from the landing for the sick children but my charges...they did not last so long. Joe would knock a certain way against the floor when there were new ones for me to care for.”

Nile swallowed. At the start, with just the abstract idea of _plague house_ , she could keep herself from imagining it but couldn’t as Nicky kept speaking. It was awful, her mind didn’t know what to fix on first. Her skin crawled at the thought of being shut up for a month in a boarded up house with no way out. She couldn’t imagine Nicky and Joe being so close yet parted like that, only able to communicate through walls, Joe’s footsteps on the floor and the occasional glimpse of each other. 

She didn’t even know how to imagine Joe upstairs, trying to keep any of the children alive, having to leave them behind one by one as they sickened. She couldn’t imagine Nicky going between them while they were dying, trying to care for them and comfort them when there was nothing he could do, having to leave the ones who died behind where they lay and go on to the next and the next and the next as more of them caught it. 

She literally couldn’t picture it. Nile knew that, she knew what she imagined didn’t come close. Her mind shied away from the full horror of it. 

“Why was it you?” Nile asked. It surprised her that Joe hadn’t tried to spare Nicky that. 

“I had more medical knowledge than Joe, such as it was at the time,” Nicky told her. Then, his tone bleak. “And I could give them the last rites. It was important to the older ones.” 

“Did you — you know — die of it?” Nile asked. 

Nicky shook his head. “Not then. We had it earlier. It only took us once.”

“You never told me how many children,” Booker said. His eyes were bright and sharp. “How many did you manage to save?”

“There were twelve to begin with,” Nicky said. He closed his eyes briefly, as if picturing them. “Two survived.”

“And did the townspeople kill them and you when they saw you survived?” Booker snapped. Nile glared at him. Again, he seemed surprised. 

“No,” Nicky said, opening his eyes. To Nile’s surprise, he smiled a little. “No. We smuggled them out of the city when we could. We stayed isolated for a time, to be sure, before we found places for them in Marseilles. They lived.” 

Nile could tell just by looking at Nicky that he knew that, for sure. She wondered how he was so sure. Had he kept tabs on them? Checked in? Did they ever even do that?

“Two of twelve,” Booker said, his voice bleak. He laughed, an unhappy, mean sound, and took a swig from the bottle. “And you could not even count the deaths it cost you.” 

Nicky frowned but there was concern in his voice now, not hurt. “We can only do what we can.” 

Booker did not seem to have heard him. “And here you are still waking from the horror of it 600 years later.”

Nicky had managed to relax again, just a little, but now his spine straightened. “Booker, you know this happens to me. How I,” he paused, grasping for the right word and Nile raised her eyebrows at the one he chose, “How I process such things. This is how. There was a mission that—that related _enough._ We were successful but that does not negate all the suffering that occurred before we intervened there. It becomes layered on top, for me.”

Nicky was moving his hands, as if to explain it, as if counting off layers to what Nile was coming to understand was the core of this nightmare — the worst experience he had that related somehow to the mission they had just completed, however distantly. 

It made her feel a little sick. 

“You know this,” Nicky repeated. 

If it was anyone else in the world, Nile would have said they looked perfectly calm, completely undistressed, but Nicky’s eyes had widened a little, and his mouth had turned down into a tiny frown, and his shoulders had curled inward just a little. He was bewildered, she thought, and a little hurt, and didn’t know how to explain himself any better than he already had. 

“You know this happens to _me,_ ” Nicky repeated again and Nile heard how gentle he was trying to be, how kind, how comforting, and her stomach dropped and she wanted to tell him to _stop_ because she didn’t think Booker was in any kind of mood for that. “It does not mean it will happen to _you._ It has not happened to you, Booker. Hey? You have to see Quynh and horrors that are closer in time to you. I am sorry for those nightmares and how they plague you. I would...”

Booker laughed. He was near tears. He was so angry it made Nile square her shoulders on instinct. 

“You would take them from me if you could. Saint Nico,” Booker downright scoffed. “Do you have any idea what I would give to dream of my—”

Booker cut himself off. Nicky’s mouth shut, his lips pressed into a thin line. 

“Do you have nightmares of him dying?” Booker asked, his voice mean, and greedy and desperate. “Or masquerading as a priest?”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Nile demanded at the same time Nicky said, softly: “No, I do not dream of that.”

They both shut up and stared at him. Nicky only had eyes for Booker, though. He looked so sad. His eyes were filled with nothing but sympathy and love. 

“That was not an evil thing to me,” Nicky said. To Nile, he looked as if he wanted to go through the screen and embrace Booker, somehow. “That you allowed that was a blessing to me.”

Booker choked. He put his hand over his mouth, pressing hard. Even though the fuzziness of their connection, Nile thought there were tears in his eyes, spilling over. 

“I have to go,” he ground out, suddenly and blindly slapping around for the button to end the call.

“Sebastien—”

“I have to go,” Booker gasped. “I’m sorry. I’ll—I’ll speak to you later. I have to go.”

The screen went dark. 

Nile didn’t know what to say. 

“Nicky,” she began and then stopped. She didn’t think apologizing was the right thing.

Nicky looked away from where Booker had been. He looked at her. There was heartbreak and resignation in his eyes, the same stalled apologies Nile knew were in hers. 

When she reached for his hand, Nicky was already reaching back. 

Nicky exhaled slowly. “I do not think it can be me that helps him.” 

It was simple and it was a tragedy. Nile wasn’t sure if it would be true forever but it was true now. 

Nile squeezed his hand. “I don’t know that he wants help right now.”

Nicky inclined his head to that and squeezed back. 

“How was it a blessing?” Nile asked after a moment. She thought she already half understood but she wanted to make sure. 

Nicky did not pretend he didn’t understand what she meant. “Jean-Pierre, he would not have Booker by his side when he was dying. He wanted a cure or...I do not know what he wanted. Booker to trade his life for Jean-Pierre’s? I do not know.”

“But he didn’t know you,” Nile murmured. 

“He did not,” Nicky agreed. “I offered to stay with him until — you must understand, in that time — he was estranged from his nephews, as well, by the end. And in that time, if you had no family to care for you then how you were treated was not always kind.”

“I get it,” Nile said. She felt compelled to point out. “It’s not so different now.”

Nicky made a face. “I know.”

“So,” Nile tried prompting gently. “You stayed with him until he died?”

Nicky nodded. “As Booker...said. I dressed as a priest and, of all of us, I try to stay the most up to date with medicine. The hospital was keen to have me. They did not question if I spent more time with Jean-Pierre than the others.”

Nile digested all that. A part of her didn’t want to but she knew people had some fucked up ideas in the old days, so she had to ask: “You asked Booker before you did that, right?”

Nicky only nodded. “Yes. We all stayed in Paris, for the most part. Joe and Andy took Booker on a mission in England, briefly but...we all stayed until Jean-Pierre passed.” 

“Was it bad?” Nile asked, dreading the answer.

“No,” Nicky replied, surprising Nile. “It was peaceful, mostly. Jean-Pierre was calmer when Booker wasn’t — I did not tell Booker that,” Nicky said, interrupting himself at the look on Nile’s face, “I was familiar with morphine and better at dosing it than many. It was new, at the time, and you could not just inject it. He was not in pain. He was aware enough to make his peace before the end. I helped him write to his nephews because that weighed on his mind. The circumstances were not kind to him, or Booker, but his death...it was a kind death.”

Nile had died a hundred times already. Nicky must have died a thousand more, a million more. 

She doubted any of his were kinder than hers. 

(Quynh had died more than all of them, terrible each time.) 

Nile understood how to Nicky that could be a blessing. 

(She thought of him, trapped in a house with everyone dying all around him, creeping into rooms with corpses in them so the still living children wouldn’t see him starve to death as he listened for Joe’s footsteps on the floor above him.)

She got it. 

(Nile’s grandparents had been like that. Her grandpa went first, in his sleep. Her grandma lived two months more, just long enough to see Nile’s youngest cousin born and then went the same way.

She hadn’t understood it when her uncle called it a kind death. Not until her father died and they couldn’t have the casket open at his funeral.)

She understood how Booker could never accept that. 

“Did you—” Nile began. 

Nicky was already shaking his head. “No. I only told him Jean-Pierre was not in pain and that I had given him the last rites. Booker asked me for that.”

Nicky’s eyes were distant. She put a hand on his arm. She wanted to know what he was thinking. 

She didn’t know why she phrased it like she did except that sometimes her grandmother had phrased it that way when Nile was a little girl. “Where are you right now?”

Nicky frowned at her. “I’m here in Ukraine. In our safe house with you.”

“No, I mean, what are you thinking?” Nile asked. 

(She wouldn’t wonder about his answer until later.)

“Ah,” Nicky huffed out a breath. “I am thinking that I wish I knew how to help my brother. And that I am sorry you met him...he is not at his worst, I would say, but he is not at his best either.”

“Have y’all tried therapy?” Nile asked before she could stop herself. 

It was apparently the right thing to say though. Nicky actually, genuinely laughed. The distance left his eyes completely. 

“I knew Freud, you know,” Nicky told her. 

Nile threw her hands up. “Of course you did.”

“Mmhm. Andy always wanted to punch him. Just once, she said,” Nicky told her. His eyes were laughing. “Idiota.” 

“You know it’s moved on from then, right?” Nile asked, exasperated. 

“Si, si,” Nicky conceded. His smile turned a little sad. “I know. I read the journals. Would you like to try to convince Booker to go? Or any of us?”

Nile thought about it. Therapy had helped her after her dad died. She hadn’t liked the army mandated stuff so much but some of it had been useful. Still...

“Do you think Andy would take her axe with her?” Nile asked. 

Nicky laughed again. “Without doubt.”

He considered it for a moment and then snorted. “Joe would go. He is already, hm, well adjusted?”

“God, he is,” Nile agreed. “How is he so well adjusted? It’s not fair.”

“Well, he is Joe,” Nicky said, as if that explained everything and there was such warmth in his eyes that Nile knew for him it did. 

It made her wonder. “Would you go?”

“Hm? Oh yes, I would tell the doctor, yes, we went to an orphanage two days ago and dealt with a very bad man. And it went off without a hitch. Nobody died who didn’t more than deserve it,” for a moment, there was something savage in Nicky’s voice before it went light again, “But I do not like seeing children hurt and so I dreamed of being in a plague house watching all the ones we just helped die instead of the ones I could not even bury centuries ago.”

Nile sucked in a breath. Except for the flash of anger when he mentioned the man who had, truly, very much deserved to die, his voice had lost none of it’s evenness. He clearly didn’t _like it_ but he also didn’t seem...Nile wasn’t sure, acutely traumatized? Or maybe he had just learned how to cope better than anyone should have to?

Nile, though. By the time Nicky stopped speaking Nile was in tears. 

Nicky’s face changed, subtly, but it was as if something suddenly broke open and she could see all his worry. Not for himself, for her. 

“Nile,” he said. He took her hands, then changed his mind and wiped away her tears, cupping her cheek. “I’m sorry. I should not have—”

“Don’t you dare,” Nile said, resolute. It didn’t matter that tears were still spilling down her cheeks onto his fingers. “This isn’t going to work if you don’t trust me as much as I trust you.”

“I promise you, it is not a matter of trust,” Nicky said gravely. His thumbs stroked over her cheeks. His face had hardly changed and he still managed to look so sad. “You are so young.”

“I have seen some shit,” Nile reminded him. “Maybe not like you. But I have. And stuff you haven't. And I'll see more. You know I will.”

Nicky sighed. He nodded. He didn’t try to bullshit her but he also hugged her to soften it. “You will.”

Nile sniffled into his shoulder. “It’s just. How do you bear it? I’m only half joking about therapy.”

“I know,” Nicky said. He pulled back to look at her, his eyes wide and intent. “I have had Joe — he is the greatest blessing of my life, as well as the love of it, and I would not have made it without him. Or Andy. Or Quynh. Or Booker.”

“And you have me,” Nicky promised, not looking away. “You have Joe and Andy. And Booker, when he is able. We must lean on each other.”

He wiped away the last of her tears. He looked like he had just come to a decision.

(Nile would come to know soon that once Nicky made a decision about something, his resolve was unshakable.)

“If that is not enough,” Nicky promised her. “Then we will find new ways.”

It was the right thing to do by her, Nile knew that. It was also not an easy thing for Nicky to promise and she knew it was a promise he would keep if she needed him to.

“Thank you,” Nile said. 

Nicky inclined his head. “If things no longer work the way we wish them to, we must change or they must. I do not think any of us wish to change you, Nile.”

Nile felt near tears again. Nicky tutted and patted her cheek. “Ah. None of that. You will make me cry too. Besides, you must know you are priceless.” 

Nile snorted and shoved him because that was all she could take and the idea of making Nicky cry after all _that_ was appalling. 

“I got that right, yes?” Nicky said, and his smile was small but it was mischievous. “I caught myself. I was going to say something about your worth but then I remembered priceless. English is such a terrible language I am shocked I did not mix them up.” 

Nile laughed. She was 99% sure Nicky was trolling her but there was a 1% chance he had almost called her _worthless_ instead of _priceless_. She couldn’t decide what was funnier. 

It made Nicky smile, she knew, seeing her laugh. He always felt more settled to her when they were all happy. 

Nile leaned back against the couch eventually. Nicky reached over and actually closed the computer, which made her feel a pang of sadness. She wondered how long it would take for Booker to respond to an email from her again. She wondered how long it would take for him to respond to one from Nicky.

Nicky picked up the cards and shuffled them. “Do you want to play again?”

“Man, I just want to go to bed again,” Nile said. She felt _exhausted._

Nicky considered her. “There is also a twin bed in our room. If you do not wish to be alone.”

“You wouldn’t mind?” Nile was touched.

“Of course not,” Nicky said, as solemnly as if he was swearing an oath, as he gathered up the mugs. “Now or any other night.”

He paused. “Just knock first.”

“Yeah, thanks, got that memo,” Nile said. She had walked in on them last week. “And you were in the _kitchen._ ” 

Nicky showed no remorse. “You were supposed to be out for another two hours. And what is that saying? Variety is the spice of life.”

Nile groaned. “You were a priest. Aren’t you supposed to be repressed or something?”

Nicky only smiled. “I did tell you I was never a very _good_ priest.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nicky discusses starving to death because he and Joe intentionally got themselves boarded up in an orphanage during the Black Death. Because it's the Black Death, the outcome for most of the children isn't great and Nile imagines what it would have been like but not super explicitly. 
> 
> Chapter title is from T. S. Eliot's poem: Four Quartets: The Dry Salvages. 
> 
> Thank you onewordnoe for the EXCELLENT beta!


	2. Coda

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for starvation. And the discussion of children dying. And PTSD flashbacks. And discussion of suicide. 
> 
> And plague? I feel like I should warn for plague these days. I think that's everything.

They waited five extra days before retrieving Nicolò and Yusuf from the boarded up house. After a brief argument, Quynh made the retrieval. She attached a thick rope to her waist, climbed down the side of one house and scaled the other in the middle of night when it was cloudy and dark and no one out was likely to look up. 

She knocked on the boarded up window and waited for Yusuf’s face to appear in the hole they had been sending baskets of food through. He looked shocked to see her but did not object as they pried the board loose together.

“How long has it been?” he asked, backing further into the room and away from her as she slipped through the window and secured the rope. 

“More than a month. Long enough we think,” Quynh told him.

She looked at him properly. He was emaciated and unwashed, his stinking garments so loose they were falling off him. 

She was so glad to see him. 

He was still staring at her as if she might not be real. He had not made a move toward her. “You are sure?”

“As sure as we can be,” Quynh told him. “And you and I can not be killed by this thing.”

That seemed to snap him out of it. He lurched forward, tears in his eyes, and then he was embracing her. Quynh held him fast. Andromache was better at this part, better at this kind of comforting; Quynh always felt too small for it. But Yusuf needed it and Quynh had missed him.

His hands were shaking when he let go but he steadied them swiftly. “I will fetch the children.” 

“How many survived?” Quynh asked, eagerly.

Yusuf’s face fell briefly before he rallied himself. “Only two. But there were many times I thought — two is a blessing.”

Quynh attempted not to let her disappointment show. They had known the number of survivors were dwindling but only two?

“I’ll fetch them,” Yusuf repeated. 

“Where is Nicolò?” Quynh asked before he could leave the room.

Yusuf paused in the doorway. He raised his hands, almost beseeching. “He is downstairs. Please, the children first.”

Quynh did not entirely understand but the missions like these, they always left odd quirks in their wake and they had known, going in, how Nicolò could struggle. He always responded best to Yusuf. Quynh would follow his lead. 

The children Yusuf ushered into the room were thin but, as Quynh and Andromache had suspected, Yusuf and Nicolò had clearly been forgoing food in favour of giving it to them. 

They looked absolutely terrified of her, especially the little boy.

“It is all right,” Yusuf was saying to them. “This is my friend. She is going to help us to the house next door.”

The young girl reached over and tugged at Yusuf’s shirt. He leaned closer so she could whisper to him. 

“Yes, we are going to leave now. It is all right,” Yusuf said. He put his hand over his heart. “You can trust her as you trust me.”

Quynh smiled at them. They were not screaming at least. 

“Marcel first,” Yusuf suggested.

The girl tugged on his sleeve again and said in a whisper. “I should go first. In case something goes wrong.”

Yusuf looked at Quynh, his eyes wet again. Quynh took a few steps closer but not  _ too  _ close and extended her hand.

“You are brave,” Quynh told the girl in what she knew was accented Provençal. “What is your name?”

“Anaïs,” she whispered, tentatively taking Quynh’s hand. 

“A beautiful name,” Quynh told her as she would have whatever the girl said. She led her to the window and showed her the rope. Anaïs looked very doubtful. 

“We will tie you to my waist so you will not fall,” Quynh told her. “Then Yusuf will help you up. I want you to close your eyes and hug me very tightly with your legs about my middle and your arms on my shoulders. Can you do that?” 

Anaïs nodded though she did not look as if she believed it. Quynh encouraged her: “A very brave girl.” 

Quynh was surprised when she actually proved to be. She kept her eyes screwed shut and held Quynh very tightly but she also did not make a peep from one window to the next where Quynh delivered her to Andromache. 

The boy — Marcel, Yusuf said — was even easier. He kept his eyes open all the way across but he seemed to enjoy it and kept quiet after Quynh put a finger to her lips — he was, she thought, still mildly terrified of her, though no less happy to be handed off to Andromache.

“Only two,” her beloved had whispered at the window. 

Quynh has nodded regretfully. “Yusuf looks like he is going to fall over. I have not seen Nicolò yet.”

“If you haven’t seen him, he’s worse,” Andromache told her, shaking her head. “I will get the children washed and heat the broth for them.” 

Quynh nodded. “You were right about them starving themselves.”

Andromache sighed. She looked tired. The month had felt very long, longer than many of the years they had spent together. 

Quynh kissed her quickly because they were there together and Andromache was frowning. It did not steal away the frown but at least it softened it enough that Quynh felt lighter scurrying back across the rope to fetch their boys.

She only saw Yusuf when she stepped off the window ledge and back into the darkened room. She opened her mouth to ask where Nicolò was when Yusuf turned to look at her, his mouth a tight grim line, and she spotted him.

Andromache was right. Nicolò looked much worse than Yusuf. 

Yusuf was gripping Nicolò’s elbow, holding him up, Quynh suspected. If Yusuf was emaciated then Nicolò looked like little more than a skeleton with skin stretched over its bones. His eyes were too wide and he was trembling. It was a fine tremor and an uncontrollable one. Quynh had starved before herself, she knew how terribly cold he must feel. 

“Did you not share any of the food with him?” Quynh demanded. 

Nicolò huffed.  _ Good, _ Quynh thought,  _ he is still there.  _ Yusuf scowled at her. 

“We saved it for the children. I died yesterday,” Yusuf said matter of factly. It made sense, they always healed a bit more after dying when their bodies had no resources to draw on. Yusuf looked at Nicolò, his eyes unbearably tender. “Do you remember when the last time was for you?”

“No,” Nicolò said in a croaking voice. 

Quynh came to him then and lifted his wrist. He tried to pull away but he was sluggish and weak. 

“The last one died only five days ago,” Nicolò was saying. “There may still be vapours on me.”

“We are going to burn your clothing and scrub you in scalding water,” Quynh told him. Then, gentler. “It will be alright, Nicolò.”

Nicolò didn’t look as if he entirely believed that. Quynh was more concerned about the way his hands shook, how cold they were and the way he didn’t flinch when she pushed her nails into the meat of his palm.

“You will not make the climb,” Quynh told him. “I will have to tie you to me. Yusuf?”

“I can make it,” Yusuf said. His hand was on Nicolò’s back now, steadying him. Nicolò had to close his eyes for a moment and they were too bright when he opened them.

Quynh was fairly sure Nicolò did not remember when he had last starved to death because he was hours or moments away from doing so  _ again _ . It made things hazy. It made it hard to think. 

He did not resist as she tied rope around their waists and Yusuf had to help him up to the window ledge before Quynh made an unsteady, unnerving trip across the rope. Nicolò weighed much less than usual but still more than a child and though he did what he could to assist her she had been right in securing him with the rope — he would have fallen many times if she had not. 

They still almost fell several times and she had trouble mostly dragging him through the window. He didn’t quite collapse into a heap on the floor as soon as she pulled him inside. He ended up in a heap on the floor, of course, but he managed to control his own descent. 

It was something, even if it only spoke to his own stubbornness. 

Yusuf quickly clambered across the rope after them once they made it across. He did not pause. He went straight to Nicolò, who pushed himself into his elbows — they looked sharp as knives, he was so thin — to meet him. Yusuf gathered as much of Nicolò as he could into his lap, pressing their faces together, cheek to cheek. 

“Did any survive?” Nicolò asked, a desperate hope in his voice.

Quynh frowned. Why wouldn’t Nicolò know that?

“Two, heart of my heart,” Yusuf told him. He was petting Nicolò’s long filthy hair. Quynh did not think he had noticed yet that clumps of it were falling out. “We saved two.”

Nicolò sighed in relief. Quynh fidgeted. She did not want to ask — it felt so cruel, she knew neither of them would risk spreading this vile disease to others — but being trapped like that, even though it was their own choosing, did funny things to your mind.

“Have either of you been sick?” Quynh asked, trying to keep the suspicion out of her voice. 

Nicolò shook his head slowly. Yusuf pressed his forehead to Nicolò’s temple. They both knew what she was asking.

“We separated the well ones from those dying,” Yusuf told her, though he was still looking at Nicolò. “I stayed with those who lived.”

Quynh grimaced. That explained much. 

“The last one died five days ago,” Nicolò repeated. The thought made him stir himself, made him suddenly restless. “We need to burn these clothes. We don’t know how long it lingers.” 

“We planned for that,” Quynh assured him, seeing the sudden dull panic in him. “Andromache took care of the children you saved. We are going to get you out of those clothes and bathe you, remember?”

“Yes,” Nicolò said. He looked determined now but still so weak. “I am here with you. I remember. I just...”

Yusuf slid his hand along Nicolò’s jawline in comfort even as Nicolò fumbled to remove his clothing. Quynh came forward to help him. Yusuf did too. Nicolò’s hands were shaking so badly he was having trouble.

“You’re here,” Yusuf assured him. “We know.”

“You are still starving,” Quyhn told him plainly. She held back her horror at seeing just how emaciated he was as they removed his underclothes. “Your body can only heal so much from that until you are fed. You will suffer the effects until then. You know I know this.”

Nicolò seemed comforted at that, at least a little. He shook harder now that he had lost even the small amount of warmth his tattered clothing provided. Yusuf stripped himself — he looked worse than Quynh had thought for having died the day before — and wrapped himself around Nicolò to share what little warmth he could.

“We must bathe first,” Nicolò said firmly. 

Quynh nodded. None of them wanted to be responsible for spreading this sickness but she knew too well what it was like to die of starvation and dehydration.

“I could snap your neck,” she offered.

Yusuf made an appalled noise beside her but Quynh could tell Nicolò was considering it. She had done it before. 

(Nicolò had the bad habit of lingering instead of giving in to a quick death. Quynh thought it could be vindictive, this gift/curse of theirs. Catastrophic injuries healed but they all thought they seemed to heal more swiftly if you died first, if you did not fight to stay alive. 

Quynh remembered all too well the first time she had seen Nicolò linger too long between the two. It had not been more than five years since they had joined forces and they had been fighting a battle on horseback. She and Andromache had followed it one way when it diverged and Nicolò and Yusuf pursued the other. She had left Andromache to salvage what she could from the bodies of their foes while she went to collect their wayward  _ boys _ . 

They had been victorious but not achieved it as easily as Andromache and she had. Their foes were scattered about the field, dead, but so were both of them. 

She found Nicolò first but only by a breath because he had dragged himself next to Yusuf, still newly dead and trapped beneath a fallen horse. Quyhn could tell by the long smear of blood that it had not been an easy journey for Nicolò. 

She was surprised to find him still alive — he seemed all shining, terrible eyes in a white face, gasping for breath even though his guts were literally hanging out and blood bubbled from his mouth. 

They had already known to watch for this. Yusuf had told them Nicolò sometimes worked himself into such a state that he could not let go of life.

But Quynh understood it. Nicolò needed to know Yusuf was safe and he hadn’t been, not until Quynh arrived. Now, though, this limbo he was in would only slow them down and keep him from his desires even longer. 

“It is all right, Nicolò,” Quyhn told him, stroking his hair. He looked at her, saw her, and knew what she was going to do. He did not have the strength to smile anymore and too much will to let go on his own, but his eyes shone with gratitude.

She snapped his neck swiftly. He went still. She did him the courtesy of pushing his intestines back into his body before going to free Yusuf from beneath the horse. It would speed the healing.)

“No,” Nicolò said. His voice was weak but his resolve was firm. “No more death.”

Quynh took his face in her hands and kissed his forehead. He exhaled and let his head loll onto Yusuf’s shoulder. Yusuf looked at her with tears in his eyes.

“Let us make sure you are clean swiftly then,” Quynh said decisively. 

Andromache had already prepared the water. With them so thin, though, Quynh felt compelled to warn them.

“The water is hot enough to hurt,” Quynh said. 

Yusuf sighed but nodded. Nicolò just accepted her words with an even gaze and held out his hand so she could pull him to his feet. 

Andromache had already bathed the children and taken them downstairs. She had refilled the wooden tubs they had procured in preparation with water from their fires. It had been boiling when Andromache poured it in and steam was still rising from it. 

Yusuf exhaled noisily and hissed as he stepped into it. Quynh had to hold Nicolò’s hands so he could get in, he swayed the moment he did not have support and blinked in a way Quynh knew meant the room was going tilted and grey for him.

She half expected him to die as she helped him lower himself into the water but he didn’t. She tutted at his instance on lingering before she began to scrub him clean, hard enough that his skin would have been raw if their bodies had not healed the way they did.

“Nicolò,” Yusuf said, something worried and a little desperate in his voice. He had paused in his own scrubbing and Quynh was tempted to throw more soap at him but he ignored her. “Nicolò. Nicolò look at me.”

Nicolò’s head had been limp against the rough cut wood of the tub and the angle was awkward, yes, but that was better than Yusuf insisting Nicolò lift it and open his bleary eyes. Quynh looked over to tell him so and, oh, the desperation and love in his eyes. He was almost panicked.

Quynh had sometimes thought that Yusuf was the best of all of them. He certainly felt as if he was the least dogged by past sorrows. He always felt so steady that she forgot sometimes, that he could be in need too.

Nicolò never did. 

“I am here, my love,” Nicolò whispered, looking straight at him. “I am here. I am with you.”

Yusuf’s shoulders slumped and he seemed to settle into his own skin better. He nodded and went back to scrubbing at his own skin so vigorously patches of it bled for less than a heartbeat before going smooth and whole again. Still, he kept glancing back at Nicolò, as if to check he was still there. Nicolò kept his eyes open and his gaze on Yusuf the entire time Quynh washed him, though Quynh knew it must have sapped what little strength he had left. 

Once they were clean and she had scrubbed herself raw as well, just in case, she left them in the bedroom that would get the most warmth from the chimney. She made sure the door to the bathing room was closed right and drew an x on the door, as she had done with the room with the window. They would not use it again before they left. 

Then, she went downstairs to the kitchen, where she knew Andromache would be. Nicolò needed sustenance or he was going to die again no matter what he desired. Yusuf, Quynh thought, would not be as far behind him as he thought himself. Getting into the house and then bathing himself would have been much more exertion than he was used to, trapped inside that damned house.

Andromache and the children were in the kitchen. She had scrubbed them so clean their skin was still bright with it. They were still eating. Nicolò and Yusuf had kept them from starving, yes, but this was better food than they had had in a month, perhaps ever. 

“Where is Yusuf?” Anaïs demanded. She looked surprised at herself but then her chin jutted out with resolve. 

Quynh thought she could come to like this girl if she had the time with her that she was not going to get. 

“You did not leave him there, did you?” Anaïs again demanded. The boy stopped eating, his expression horrified. 

Andromache shook her head and put more bread in front of them. “They are upstairs bathing as you had to.”

“I was just with Yusuf and Nicolò,” Quynh assured her. “I am going to take them some food now.”

“They should come eat with us!” The boy — Marcel — exclaimed. “I want to see Yusuf.”

Anaïs was older and smarter and knew to fear though. She looked alarmed. “Is Yusuf ill? Or—or the other man?”

Andromache frowned. Quynh ignored it for now. “No. Just very tired. I promise.”

Anaïs thought about that as Andromache helped Quynh gather what she needed. Quynh could see the questions pressing behind her lips. 

“We did not see the other man,” Anaïs said, without prompting. Quynh kept working as Andromache turned to look at her. 

“Nicolò,” she pronounced it uncertainly, “Yusuf told us stories of him but he stayed with the other children. The ones who died.”

“They did that to keep you well,” Quynh told her. She was so glad Andromache had agreed to deal with the children and left Yusuf and Nicolò to her. “That is why they are tired.”

“I want to see Yusuf,” Marcel repeated. Anaïs was looking down at her plate, her lip starting to quiver.

“I will tell him,” Quynh said gravely. “And you will meet Nicolò tomorrow.”

She did not stay to see what they thought of that prospect. Andromache followed her out of the kitchen door, just into the hallway. 

“How bad is it?” Andromache asked. 

“I thought the heat from the water would kill Nicolò. It did not,” Quynh told her. “Yusuf is worse than he thinks he is. If they ate anything we sent over at all, it was very little.” 

“The food should revive Yusuf quickly, then,” Andromache said, relieved. “Is Nicolò with us?”

Quynh nodded. “He is weak but he is present. If he is confused, it is the starvation doing it. The cure for that, too, is food.”

“I will not keep you then,” Andromache told her. She kissed her again, lightly. Quynh had not realized how closely their bodies had pressed together in the small space until Andromache stepped back. 

“Have fun with the children,” Quynh said, slyly, just to see Andromache’s eyes spark before she lugged the tray she was carrying upstairs. 

She expected to find Nicolò and Yusuf to be in the bed or perhaps slotted together in the chair by the chimney. They were by the chimney, as close to the brick as they could be without burning themselves, but they were sitting on the floor. Nicolò had his back pressed up against the wall, leaning into Yusuf’s side, blankets from the bed wrapped around them. Yusuf looked beside himself with worry. Nicolò’s hands were pressed to his eyes and his head was hanging. Quynh thought he did not have the strength to lift it. 

She remembered it all too well. 

“Nicolò,” she said softly, squatting so she didn’t loom above him. 

“My head is pounding,” Nicolò said in a creaking voice. 

Quynh nodded. “It is sharp and dull and then it recedes to nothing and then it comes back.”

“Yes,” Nicolò said. 

“You are starving, sweet one,” Quynh told him. “You have too many times in a row already.”

She saw the way Yusuf blinked and then stared at her, saw Nicolò open his eyes a slit to look at her, as they both realized she knew because she had survived worse before.

She had never spoken much to them of the time before Andromache found her, when she walked into the wastelands to rid the world of herself, deathless or not. 

She ladled the broth into a bowl for Yusuf. He refused it when she tried to hand it to him.

“Nicolò first,” he insisted as Quynh had known he would.

“You will recover faster,” Quynh told him sternly. “Then you can aid him and us. He will not be able to eat as much. He is closer to death. It will take longer for him since Nicolò will not let me kill him.”

Nicolò snorted and winced. Quynh patted his knee. “And the broth is still too hot right now. It will sting his throat.”

The way to get Yusuf to do anything was to tell him it would spare Nicolò even the slightest pain. Quynh was surprised he looked like he still might protest until Nicolò said his name, soft but commanding. Yusuf gave in. 

He was, as Quynh suspected, though not as bad as Nicolò, still  _ bad _ . He had used up the last of his reserves to get over the rope and then he had kept going even still. His bowl was too heavy for him when it was full. 

Quynh helped him lift it, refused to let him guzzle it down like his body craved because it would only make him sick. Once that was drained, she offered him the bread and cheese. His empty stomach was satisfied enough that he could rip off pieces for himself instead of gorging on it.

Nicolò had not raised his head from Yusuf’s shoulder. Quynh touched his side to try to bring him back to them and to her relief he came readily enough. He looked woozy and had to fight to keep his eyes opened but he was there behind them. 

Quynh understood why he would not desire it but it truly would have been much easier if he had just let her kill him so he could recover more quickly. 

“Eat, faithful Nicolò,” Quynh commanded as she held the spoon to his lips. 

Thankfully, he did not resist her. After the first drops touched his lips, he was eager for the spoonfuls of broth she fed him. She was glad; it was better that Yusuf saved his energy and did not have to expend it on coaxing Nicolò to eat. 

She waited until Nicolò had eaten enough to settle Yusuf’s worry before she said, casually: “The children are asking for you.” 

Yusuf froze, his mouth full of the last of his cheese and bread. Quynh would have smiled — she had timed it right, introduced the broth slowly enough that his body healed instead of wanting to expel it, so that each little bit healed him  _ more _ and now he could go gorge himself if he wanted to without worrying about making himself sick. She would have smiled except that would have made him stubborn, made him refuse to leave, and that was not what she wanted.

Nicolò’s eyes flicked up to her. Quynh kept her expression blank but he read her like a well lettered scroll all the same. 

“Asking?” he echoed. He was already trying to slowly lift his head from Yusuf’s shoulder. 

“It may be more of a demand from Anaïs,” Quynh said evenly as she fed Nicolò another spoonful. 

Yusuf closed his eyes for a moment. “Is she giving Andromache trouble?” 

Nicolò laughed — a gravelly version of his usual laugh but genuine. It made Quynh smile. That and the idea that anyone could give Andromache  _ trouble. _

Yusuf looked from Nicolò to Quynh and back. “I know what you are doing. You are not tricking me.”

“You should go see them,” Nicolò said plainly. He closed his eyes to put his energy into speaking. “They will need to see you. You know this.” 

Yusuf  _ fidgeted.  _ That was the only word for it. Nicolò said nothing more. Quynh thought it wise and did the same, only continued carefully pushing spoonfuls of broth against Nicolò’s lips. 

“Nicolò...” Yusuf began, then stopped. He blinked away tears. 

Nicolò’s hands emerged from the blankets to squeeze his. “I am here. Quynh is not going anywhere.” 

Yusuf looked at her, his eyes wet. Quynh looked back solemnly and promised: “Not even after he finishes.”

Nicolò frowned, peering at the broth as if it were an ocean instead of a bowl. He took another spoonful from Quynh and then turned his head. He rested his head against Yusuf’s shoulder for a moment, as Yusuf’s hand fell unconsciously to Nicolò’s drying hair, stroking it slowly. After a moment, Nicolò pressed a kiss there before lifting his head away completely from that comfort. 

“They still need you,” Nicolò said. 

Yusuf sighed. Quynh knew that the last thing in the world he wanted to do was part himself from Nicolò’s side. The last thing Nicolò wanted was for him to go. But he would. It was who he was. Who they were. 

Boundless hearts, the both of them. Quynh did not know how they did it.

Yusuf kissed Nicolò’s brow, then bent his head to kiss Nicolò’s hands, then his lips, chastely. 

“I will be back before you sleep,” he murmured before he forced himself to stand and leave. 

Quynh scooter closer to Nicolò in case he was still woozy enough to overbalance. He slumped a little without Yusuf’s support but he stayed upright. 

“You will eat all of this,” Quynh told him solemnly.

Nicolò exhaled. He conceded. “It is helping. It just...”

“Hurts,” Quynh answered for him. She did not raise another spoonful yet, instead shredding some bread into the broth to make it soft. “And makes you feel sick. I know.”

Nicolò looked at her and said nothing. He had always been too patient, Quynh thought. 

But, she could use that to distract him. She lifted another spoonful for him and he did not object. She made him eat three more before she spoke. 

“You and Yusuf are blessed to have died and been reborn together,” Quynh said. She lifted another spoonful to his lips, this time with some of the dissolving bread. He took it.

“I was not so lucky,” Quynh told him. Another spoonful. “It took Andromache a long time to find me.”

Another spoonful. Another. Another. Nicolò looked queasy. Quynh let the spoon lie in the bowl for a moment as she told him: “I did not want to be and I could not die. So I took myself away from all I knew or would know. I walked for years before I found the wastelands.”

She lifted another spoonful. He took a shaky breath and ate it. She paused before lifting another. 

“I walked into the wastelands until I could walk no longer,” Quynh told him. “I died and when I lived again, I did not rise for many years, until it did not matter if I was living or dying to myself or anyone in the world.”

“And then Andromache came,” Nicolò whispered. 

“Then Andromache came,” Quynh agreed. “And brought me back to life.”

“I had only one night of true despair,” Nicolò confessed, his eyes closed and his head tipped back against the wall. Quynh felt her mouth fall open in shock; she had not heard this piece of Nicolò’s story before. “It was before I knew Yusuf, though we had killed each other several times by then. When all attempts to slay myself failed, I returned to the field of battle without thought for too many more years than I should have before ...”

“Before you found yourself across the battlefield from Yusuf,” Quynh finished for him because she  _ had  _ heard this part of the story before. “And could not lift your blade to kill him again.”

Nicolò’s lips curved in a tiny, self-satisfied smile. “Well. You know what I will do for that grin of his.”

Quynh laughed at that, even as Nicolò continued, pensively: “He has saved me many times. Though I am unworthy of it.”

Quynh stuck her tongue out at him to make him smile again. In her mind, Nicolò had always been too Catholic in his need to atone for his perceived sins, now centuries old. 

She scraped the bottom of the bowl and he opened his mouth for the last mouthful. Before she could put it down, he caught her wrist in his tremulous grip. When she looked at his face, he was watching her with that too close gaze of his.

But his question was plain and plaintive, not profound. “How long will it take?” 

Quynh considered. It was a delicate thing, after they had been starving for so long, to feed them enough that their bodies could use it to heal but not expel it as a mortal would. They still, after all, suffered as those they walked among did. 

“I will be waking you and Yusuf every hour to make you take more food,” she told him. “Yusuf will be well by morning. You will be well by nightfall, though still little more than skin and bones.”

She would have poked him, if she had not known it would hurt him. He was still looking at her with those too-knowing eyes. 

“I am glad Andromache found you,” Nicolò said quietly, almost shyly.

“I am glad we found our boys,” Quynh told him with complete — and false — solemnity. 

Nicolò huffed. “You can no longer think us little more than babes in arms by now.”

“Oh no, you are toddling about now, surely,” Quynh replied and grinned at his small smile. Her fingers folded around his. “Do you think you can stand?”

Nicolò hummed. “It is warm here.”

“It will be warm in the bed,” Quynh said in reply to his non-answer. “Your body is going to realize it needs to sleep now that you have been fed and it will do so very, very soon. I know,” Quynh continued when Nicolò would have interrupted her, “You are going to wait for Yusuf but this way we will not have to carry you.”

Nicolò wrinkled his nose. “He is shakier than he wants to believe. All right.” 

Quynh had to help him to his feet but after a moment he managed to stand on his own. He was like a newborn fawn walking the short distance to the bed but he made it without her, groaning as he lay down on the mattress. Quynh brought the blankets that had been by the chimney and covered him with them before perching cross legged near his head. She reached down to stroke his hair and Nicolò glared at her.

It only made Quynh laugh at him.

“I know, you are going to wait for your Yusuf,” she cooed, teasing. “Would you rather I sharpen my knives over you?” 

“So one can slip?” Nicolò said ever dryly.

“You missed your chance to make things easier on yourself,” Quynh assured him but she did stop stroking his hair. 

It was boring waiting with Nicolò as he forced himself to stay awake out of sheer stubbornness but she had promised and she did not think Yusuf would be  _ too  _ long. She was listening for the creek of his footsteps on the stairs when Nicolò surprised her by speaking again.

“The children can not stay here,” Nicolò said with quiet certainty. “What have you and Andromache planned?”

Quynh indulged herself and ran her fingers through his hair again for a few moments. “We purchased a carriage. We will depart tomorrow night.”

(Nicolò and Yusuf would sleep for most of the day, exhausted, and unable to rest properly with Quynh or Andromache shaking Nicolò awake every hour until they left — and Yusuf half that time — to force food on him. 

They would hide with the children in the false bottom Andromache had built into the carriage until they were out of the city. It would be a relief to escape — Marcel and Anaïs would take turns riding with Quynh and Andromache as they drove while Nicolò curled into Yusuf’s side inside and napped as Yusuf told stories to whichever child stayed with them.)

“Andromache has found us some hovel to stay in for a few more weeks,” Quynh told him and Nicolò huffed because he knew as well as she did that Andromache was as likely to have found them an abandoned manor as she was a cave. “In case any of us are carrying the sickness.”

_ And to recover _ , Quynh did not say because she did not need to. 

(Nicolò would sleep like the dead for three nights, too exhausted for dreams, before the nightmares came for him. The abandoned house Andromache had found them was not large, like the one they would leave behind in Lyon, but it had more than one room. She and Quynh would take turns staying with the children or staying with their boys. None of them had needed to speak to know that Nicolò could not sleep in the same space as their temporary charges. 

Nicolò never screamed himself awake but he thrashed enough to wake the whole room. He always knew where Yusuf was, when he woke, no matter how terrible the nightmare, but there had been a time or two in the distant past where that was all he knew, not where he was or who else was with them. 

And Nicolò was dangerous when he thought someone was threatening Yusuf. 

Plus, in the beginning, the children were scared enough of him as it was, this man they had never seen while locked away in the house, who the other children disappeared to only when they were dying. The first few days they clung to Yusuf and Andromache. They stared at Quynh with awe and Nicolò with fear. 

But Nicolò was patient and gentle and kind. It only took a few days for them to stop seeing the spectre who had haunted the rooms they had not been allowed to touch and instead see the man Yusuf told silly stories about. 

Quynh did not think it hurt that Nicolò sighed and huffed as she constantly forced him to eat, as if he were a child himself, though he ate everything she pressed into his hands, as Yusuf did. It amused the children and it did not take long for Nicolò to stop looking so ghost-like.

By the time they left for Marseilles, Marcel only wanted to ride with Nicolò, who had been a knight — and oh, how Nicolò had glared at Yusuf for speaking of  _ that  _ — and Anaïs was whispering her worries into his ear when Yusuf was not available to hear them.) 

“When we are sure it is safe, we will find the children a place in a new city,” Quynh said. She ran her fingers through Nicolò’s hair again. Gentle Nicolò, whose lips tugged down into a frown at the thought of taking the children away from all they had ever known. Practical Nicolò, who understood the need of it even now and would be the one to convince Yusuf, the biggest, kindest heart of them all, that it was right. 

(Marcel would be happy enough with the small family Nicolò found for him — close enough to what his own had been. He would go on to be the village blacksmith, charitable and kind, who would marry his equal. One day a descendant of his would help smuggle hundreds of people and countless pieces of art out of the grasp of the Nazis.

Anaïs would not be so willing to leave them. It would take days for Yusuf to persuade her, after days of Quynh and Andromache persuading them that no, they could not settle down and stay with her for a time instead. Eventually, the promise of learning to read persuaded her to stay at a nunnery and there were fragments and texts that survived to the modern day only because she had taken the time to copy them out in her clear hand.) 

“Is he asleep?” Yusuf asked from the doorway. 

“He is not,” Nicolò replied quietly, propping himself up ever so slightly at the sound of Yusuf’s voice.

Yusuf smiled so joyously it would have been heartbreaking if Nicolò did not answer it in turn; he did so wholeheartedly, not even in the usual quiet way of his. Quynh often thought that Nicolò had learned delight from Yusuf and so could only answer it from him in kind.

“The children are sleeping,” Yusuf told him and Quynh removed herself from the bed so Yusuf could sink into it at Nicolò’s side. He cupped Nicolò’s cheek against his palm. “Do you need persuading as well?”

“I am well persuaded, only waiting for you,” Nicolò told him. Quynh could see his fingers had hooked into Yusuf’s shirt, clutching lightly, as if to keep him there. 

“I will wake you in an hour,” Quynh reminded them. Yusuf frowned at her but then sighed and nodded, knowing better than to argue.

“Andromache is waiting for you downstairs,” Yusuf told her, without looking away from Nicolò. He was shifting, pulling Nicolò into his arms to sleep as they had slept for all the many decades Quynh had known them. Nicolò’s eyes had already closed. 

Quynh left them. She snuck down the stairs on silent feet. Andromache’s back was to her when she reached the kitchen, peering into the stew pot over the fire and allowing Quynh to believe she had snuck up on her.

Quynh knew better. She knew Andromache traced every step she took across the uncreaking floor from the moment she stepped out of the bedroom until she pressed a warm kiss on the back of Andromache’s clothed shoulder and made her smile. 

“Did the children give you much trouble?” Quynh asked. 

“Which ones?” Andromache replied. She gestured with the ladle. “I am going to the trouble of pulverizing the meat in this for those boys of ours.”

Quynh laughed. “Oh, but they have three hundred years behind them now.”

“I have had hairs for longer lengths of time,” Andromache groused but she was grinning as she turned to kiss Quynh more closely and less quickly than before. 

“How is my Nicolò?” she asked, a certain softness in her voice, when they parted. 

“Well,” Quynh declared. When Andromache raised an eyebrow at her, she added. “He did not decapitate me this time.” 

Andromache grimaced in remembrance even as she turned back to distract herself with the stew Quynh knew had been perfectly fine when she finished cooking it. 

“It does not seem like before,” Quynh said, thinking through Nicolò’s behaviour for the past few hours. “And that was nearly a hundred years ago.”

“It would not yet,” Andromache said, frowning. “We will have to keep an eye on them, in case. If the memories begin to overcome him again, I do not want them to fall into old habits.”

“I do not think they will,” Quynh said, though she already knew it would not be enough. “They were never as young as we thought them; they are less so now.”

Andromache made an annoyed sound. Quynh wondered when she would stop thinking of Yusuf and Nicolò as hers to protect from the world, if she ever would. There had been a shift in her after Lykon died. Or perhaps it was because it had been so long since there had been a new one before they began to dream of Nicolò and Yusuf. Perhaps because they had arrived together, as if they were truly destined, as Nicolò liked to say, as Quynh sometimes found herself believing. 

There was a difference, though, between the way Andromache was with them. Quynh had never figured out how to describe it but she knew that Andromache would put herself in front of a blade for them, the way Nicolò did for Yusuf, even when it was foolish. 

_ Oh _ , Quynh thought, and wrapped herself around Andromache’s stiff back. 

“They were better in that house, with those children, than we would have been,” Quynh told her bluntly. 

Andromache could have been made of marble but Quynh knew how to make her crack.

“We could not have gotten there before the boards went up,” Quynh said. “But that does not matter. It had to be them. Because they did a better job than we would have. Certainly better than I would have! But better than you too. And you should not feel guilty about that.” 

Andromache made a sound like a growl. Quynh nuzzled her forehead against the back of Andromache’s neck. 

“Do you remember what I told you?” Andromache asked, her voice coiled and dangerous.

“They have kept their soft hearts,” Quynh replied. “They have kept their kindness. That is  _ why  _ it had to be Nicolò giving his gentle heart to dying children. It is  _ why  _ Yusuf had to keep the living ones from giving up hope.” 

“You might have managed but I would have made a mess of  _ that _ ,” Quynh continued. “We both know I am not made for missions of mercy.”

“No one should be made for  _ that, _ ” Andromache said, her lip curling as if she could snarl at the world for what it had done to her boys. 

“No, but perhaps they were,” Quynh mused, half to herself. She saw suffering and became vengeful; Andromache righteous. Lykon had been closest to their boys, but his remedy had always been laughter no matter how it wore at him. 

Yusuf first sought to soothe and he had brought that out in Nicolò too, from where it had been stifled, until it was as natural to him as breathing, no matter how great their skill in battle had proven to be. 

“What else did they keep their soft hearts for?’ Quynh asked. 

Andromache turned to her and set her ladle down with a sharp crack and answered: “Themselves.”

Quynh laughed merrily both at the sight of Andromache with a ladle, of all things, and more at the idea of their Nicolò and Yusuf being anything but what they were. It would be easier to ask the sun not to shine than to ask Yusuf to give up his kindness and it was always so terrible when they had to watch Nicolò set aside his gentleness for the ruthlessness they all knew he possessed.

Andromache huffed and glared at her. And then she smiled because she knew Quynh was right. 

“Poor Andromache,” Quynh teased and Andromache flicked a piece of chicken at her. Quynh danced out of the way before ordering: “Stop feeling guilty. It makes you cranky and does them no good. Go check on them yourself like you want to.”

“I’ll wake them,” Andromache said but she rolled her shoulders and her back was straight but no longer tense. “I will wait until you want to stuff them full of food again.”

Quynh hummed. It was a compromise she could accept. Perhaps she would never stop feeling so responsible for their  _ boys. _ It was a change to what they had with Lykon. 

But perhaps that was all right. 

All things changed with time. 

(Andromache had not been so fond of Nicolò at first. 

_ Or, no,  _ Quynh thought,  _ that was not quite what it was. _ It was not that she was not fond of him. When Quynh thought it over, it was much more complex than that. 

Andromache  _ loved  _ Nicolò. She doted on him as if he were one of the small sisters she barely remembered. Often enough, she touched him with more tenderness than she did Quynh, who had less desire for that kind of softness. And he was sweet with her in return, sweet with all of them. Quynh almost did not know what to do with the million small kindnesses he brought into their lives as if it were nothing the same way she was sometimes unsure of all the joy Yusuf laid at their feet. 

But as much as she loved him, Andromache was suspicious of him, of his ability to take of himself, let alone have their backs. She didn’t trust him to look after himself. She saw his softness, his unyielding kindness, and thought it was weakness. 

Quynh knew. She had known Andromache for millennia. No matter how she tried to hide it, Quynh could see the sneer in her motionless lips. She thought it might be Lykon haunting her. Andromache had been harsher with people since their smiling warrior left them for good. 

Quynh, of course, knew better. Like recognized like after all. She looked at Nicolò and saw the ruthlessness in him at once but she too, felt that something was not as it seemed, when it came to their youngest companion. Yusuf hovered too closely sometimes, and when they bent their heads together it was not always love poetry that passed between them.

There was some ghostly thing dogging Nicolò’s steps, though when Quynh said as much to Andromache, Andromache only rolled her eyes at her.

The first battle they fought together did not go so well for Nicolò, Quyhn would admit that. He was caught unaware, not entirely his fault, the bandits had snuck up under cover of darkness and he had been unfortunate enough to be returning from the river alone, and had only managed to shout a warning to them before he had had his head chopped off.

Yusuf had proved his worth in the ensuing fight with them, then dropped to his knees beside Nicolò’s still dead body looking distraught. 

Andromache had strode over and pushed Nicolò’s head and neck more firmly together — it had not been cleanly severed. Joe took several steps back and turned around to be sick. 

“He’ll heal faster this way,” Andromache told him. But she stayed there, holding Nicolò together, as if somehow he might not know how to do it himself. As if any of them were any better at coming back to life than the others. 

It was only seconds later that Nicolò shuddered awake, looking confused and still in pain. And here, again, though Quynh knew she was annoyed by the time it was taking, Andromache was gentle with Nicolò.

“You are going to be fine,” Andromache told him, her hands light on the side of his face as if she knew it and he did not. “Deaths like this take longer to heal. The pain will stop soon.”

Yusuf dropped to his knees by Nicolò’s side again and he tentatively touched his face. Nicolò’s lips were still bloody. Quynh wondered if he would die again before he was done healing. Andromache hauled him up into a sitting position though, which looked unceremonious but was, again, a kindness, because he could cough blood out into his lap instead of choking on it.

“That boy,” Andromache whispered, seething with worry, to Quynh late in the night. She made a face and came to a decision. “I am going to teach him how to track.”

Quynh understood her thinking. She looked over to where Nicolò and Yusuf slept. Yusuf was curled around Nicolò’s body, yes, but  _ Yusuf’s  _ back was to the fire and beyond that, them. Nicolò was in front and had his sword within easy reach. And he had laid out their pallets.

“Nicolò will make a good tracker,” Quynh said because it was true. “But Yusuf must learn as well. He will be the better of the two.”

Andromache scoffed but did not disagree. They would both need to learn but Quynh already knew she would take extra time and care with Nicolò,  _ doting  _ on him as if he needed that skill to make up for a lack in others.

“They are both lacking when it comes to daggers,” Quynh said, thoughtfully. “And Nicolò has some skill but Yusuf is  _ terrible  _ with a bow.”

“Nicolò’s hands are steady,” Andromache allowed. They had both seen the way he tended to the wounded. He did indeed have steady hands. Quynh thought he would always make a better archer of the two, no matter how many years of practise Yusuf had, but that Yusuf would prove to be better with daggers. 

But that was not why Andromache suggested it. Yusuf had already proved himself to her; Nicolò had not.

“I will teach them both,” Quynh said again. 

She did. The bow first, because Yusuf had further to catch up with that skill; Nicolò absorbed all she said like a sea sponge, he was going to be a master of it, she could  _ tell,  _ he was going to surpass  _ her _ and oh, how it annoyed her and made her gleeful at once _.  _

Daggers were next. Nicolò was very good with his heavy sword; Yusuf perhaps a touch better with his scimitar — though Quynh thought that was wrong too. Everything about them made her think they should be evenly matched but there was something, some hesitation in the way Nicolò moved, that she did not understand and he could not seem to overcome. 

Andromache was trying to teach them how to fight as one — how to perfect the way they already moved together. The daggers would compliment that. They were too clumsy with them, too reliant on their bigger weapons. 

Quynh relished the challenge of teaching them. They did try not to kill each other so much, since Lykon died, but that did not mean she did not have them on the run with small stinging cuts for every wrong move they made. 

She found it a very effective way to teach: it made them correct their mistakes so much faster. But...she did notice the dark looks Yusuf gave her when she drew Nicolò’s blood, particularly when the cuts came fast and many at a time. Sometimes it took Nicolò a few more moments than she expected to rise, then, sometimes he seemed to need to shake himself to do so, but Quynh gave him that time when she would have put her boot to Yusuf’s backside if he had done the same. 

Nicolò nightmares were worse, after sparring sessions like that with Quynh or Andromache. They could not help but hear him wake, though Yusuf pulled him further away from the warmth of the fire — further away from them. And in the daytime, they would find a time to walk away together — Yusuf always led them, Quynh thought. 

She had followed them once. They walked without aim, which would have worried her if Yusuf had not bent so close to speak with Nicolò, if, in time, Nicolò had not haltingly replied to him. 

If Yusuf had not stopped sometimes, when Nicolò’s face went blank and terrible or creased with sorrow, and embraced him for a long, long time, as if hiding Nicolo from the world. 

So, she gave Nicolò more time, when he needed it to rise, but she did not know how to ask what was  _ wrong  _ and they did not offer. 

None of them should have been so surprised that the stalemate they were all living with could not last.

Yusuf had gone to check their traps; Andromache to hunt. Quynh had taken the chance to try and teach Nicolò some footwork he could not master, though, she would later reflect, he had been reluctant, without Yusuf there. 

It did not go well, even in the beginning. There were dark circles under Nicolò’s eyes from three straight days worth of nightmares and Quynh was frustrated because her plan to distract him from those troubles was not  _ working  _ and he could not seem to follow her teaching. His sword work, even, was sloppy, which it never was, and his stance was worse, he would be bowled over in battle by a stiff wind let alone one of their enemies. 

And maybe Andromache was right and Quynh was wrong about him. Maybe they had not been sent a warrior this time. She did not know what that would mean, what they would do. How they could manage to teach him properly if that were so. 

Nicolò stepped backwards and nearly tripped. He caught himself, he did, but it meant he wasn’t guarding himself. 

Quynh, beyond frustrated, gritted her teeth and drove her dagger down, through his foot, to teach him a lesson about keeping his guard up  _ and  _ keeping his feet. 

She only had a moment to see his face spasm, to see a wild, blank kind of terror snap into his eyes. She had no way to block it as his sword swung down and into her neck. 

When she revived, Nicolò had disappeared and Andromache was there, leaning over her. Her face was furious and, Quynh thought, a little heartbroken. 

“What happened?” Quynh demanded. 

“He killed you. Nearly cut your head off,” Andromache spat. “And then fled. I shot him with an arrow.”

Quynh frowned. She remembered the sudden terror in Nicolo’s eyes. It had been so strange. 

“Where is he?” she asked. 

“I do not know,” Andromache answered, still seething. 

It was not that he had killed her, Quynh thought. With them, when sparring, such accidents happened. To Andy, though, that Nicolò had fled was the unforgivable trespass.

“Something was wrong,” Quynh told Andromache. “His eyes. They changed.”

“He ran,” Andromache said shortly. “He can return to us when he wishes to face it though I do not know what we will do with him when he returns. He is unreliable. We will have to leave him behind when we go into battle.”

She continued to seethe for the full half hour it took for Yusuf to return, long past when Quynh grew tired of listening to it. She was almost glad to have Andromache turn her glare on him by then, to watch the smile drop from Yusuf’s face like the brace of rabbits he had returned with as Andromache viciously told him what happened, if only so she no longer had to listen to it. 

But Yusuf did not attempt to defend his love to them. Instead, his face went pale and grey and he only said: “Where is he?”

“He fled,” Andromace said scathingly. “I did not care to pursue him. You can follow the blood if you wish to.”

Yusuf turned to do so immediately. Andromache's lips thinned in terrible anger. Quynh had had enough. She caught Yusuf’s arm and yanked him back before he could run off. She pulled so hard he ended up on the ground before them. 

“You know why,” Quynh said. “He was terrified. I have never seen such a look in his eyes, even when he is dying. What has been done to him?”

Yusuf told them, not all, and reluctantly, but enough for Andromache's anger to evaporate like morning dew and for Quynh’s heart to ache for their little brother. They departed together to find him. It would go faster with Andromache leading the way. 

They found him pressed up against a boulder farther from their camp than Quynh would have thought when each step away from it had to be agony. Andromace had fired  _ two  _ arrows into him, not one. One was broken off in his shoulder and one was embedded deep in his gut. His skin was healing, closing around it and he was trying to rip it out, bloody fingers scrambling around the shaft. He kept dying before he could remove it and only ripping his wounds open again once he revived. Quynh thought he had been trying for some time but he was not  _ there  _ enough to succeed. Every time he revived, the panic took him. 

His eyes were wide and staring, blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth. It was clear that he did not see them, that he was somewhere else. 

Andromache cursed. Yusuf went to him without hesitation, speaking calmly, even when Nicolò jerked away from him, even when he lashed out. Yusuf caught his body as it fell when the movement was too much and Nicolò choked, gurgled and died again. 

Quynh and Andromache moved as one as soon as Nicolo went limp in Yusuf’s arms. Quynh’s dagger went into Nicolò’s shoulder, digging deep to scrape the arrowhead from bone. Andromache's hands plunged into the wound in his stomach, easing the arrow from his flesh. 

By the time Nicolò gasped awake, they were backing away, hands bloody with their prizes. Nicolò jerked and Yusuf caught him. 

“I am here, Nicolò,” Yusuf said. “You are free. You are free. You are with me, see? There is grass beneath you not stone. You are free.”

Nicolò’s eyes focused on Yusuf’s face. His body was still rigid with tension but his struggling ceased. Removing the source of pain seemed to have helped. He blinked and then blinked again. His mouth, his bloodied lips, trembled. 

“Yusuf...?” he whispered. 

Yusuf nodded, taking Nicolò’s hands in his. “I am here, my heart. Do you know where you are?”

“I was there,” Nicolo said. He sounded absolutely sure of it. “It...It hurt. I was there.”

“You are here, with me. With Andromache and Quynh,” Yusuf said, nodding at them. Nicolò’s eyes did not leave Yusuf’s face. “We did not know them all that time ago, my heart. You know this. All those that hurt you are long dead now. You are safe.”

Nicolò started to shake. He looked at Yusuf in horror. “It happened again.”

“Yes, Nicolò,” Yusuf said. Nicolò choked and tried to curl tighter against Yusuf’s body, as if to hide. Yusuf wouldn’t let him. “It happened again but you are here with me now. You will stay with me, yes?” 

Nicolò had not looked away from his lover once. Being given that purpose, now, seemed to calm him. “Yes.” 

“That is good,” Yusuf praised. “Can you tell me where you are?”

“With you,” the fingers of Nicolò’s other hand curled in Yusuf’s shirt. His eyes darted away to look at Andromache and Quynh. “With Andromache and Quynh.”

He looked around and registered that they were not where they had made camp several days ago and confessed. “I do not know how I came to be here.”

It did not surprise Quynh when Andromache stepped forward. Andromache had coaxed her from the wastelands, after all, and taught her how to eat and breath and fuck and fight and  _ live  _ again. 

“Quynh put a dagger through your foot while you were sparring,” Andromache told him, finding his weak point unerringly simply from what she had been told. Nicolò flinched more deeply than Quynh had ever seen simply from her words and Yusuf’s hold on him tightened. 

“You are here with me,” Yusuf reminded him. “Hm? It is only you and me and Andromache and Quynh.”

“None of us will willingly hurt you,” Andromache said, her voice firm but gentle. She gave Yusuf a harder look than she had given Nicolò. “We should have known of this before.”

To Quynh’s delight, Nicolò gave her a flat look right back, his hold on Yusuf tightening as much as Yusuf’s had tightened on him. He was still trembling in the aftermath of wherever his mind had taken him — Quynh was reminded of a young cat she had once rescued from being drowned, before her first life ended, sopping wet and shivering and scared but it had still growled low in its throat and taken a swipe at her as soon as it was free. 

Quynh had adored that cat. 

“ _ I  _ did not want to tell you,” Nicolò told her. “Yusuf thought we should but it—it is my burden first.” 

“That was foolish,” Andromache told him plainly but she leaned closer to him with her hands open and when it was clear it would be welcomed, the hand she laid on his cheek was soft. Nicolò’s eyes were still too wide, too sharp, and Quynh could see his fingers trembling. 

_ Too close _ , she thought, feeling the blood on her hands.  _ It’s still too close. We should not do this here.  _

Andromache was of the same mind. She did not press, not yet, but offered Nicolò a hand up, instead. He took it, still wary, and was not even on his feet before he was looking back,  _ reaching _ back, for Yusuf. Yusuf was there, tangling their fingers together, before Nicolò could feel his absence, even though it made it harder for Yusuf to find his own feet. 

“We will speak of this more later,” Andromache said but it was gentle. Nicolò met her eyes without flinching or looking away and the directness of his gaze would have made Quynh smile if the circumstances had been different. “You need to wash, eat something and have a drink.”

As they walked back to their camp, Andromache brought her steps in line with Quynh’s. She did not have to speak for Quynh to know to fetch the skein of brew they had been saving when they returned. They saw Yusuf and Nicolò washed and fed, they built a fire that would last well into the night, and then Quynh handed Nicolò the skein. Yusuf did not look entirely pleased as Nicolò drank deeply of it but he did not object, only made sure he stayed so close that Nicolò never even had to reach for him. 

Once the story came spilling out, once Nicolò said all he could bear to tell them, Quynh was shocked he had left one drop behind. She would have drained it dry and asked for more. 

They were quiet for a long time. Quynh had taken up a watch on the other side of the fire. It was not needed but they all saw the way it made Nicolò’s eyes lose some of their wildness. Andromache was seated on a stump but for a moment she looked like the goddess Quynh knew she had been worshipped as once. Nicolò was sitting on the ground, his head resting against her knee. Yusuf was stretched out before the fire with his head in Nicolò’s lap. One of Nicolò’s arms trailed down over his shoulder and Yusuf had reached up to fit their hands together. 

“How often do you find yourself there?” Andromache asked, at last. “In those waking nightmares?”

“It is...not so bad as it once was,” Nicolò said, haltingly but calmly. As if they were not speaking of what took Nicolò’s mind away from him and put him back in a place that held nothing but pain. 

When he offered nothing more, Andromache prompted: “Tell me.”

“It used to happen...more and I would not always know why. I would simply,” he swallowed, “I would simply be  _ there  _ again and when I came back to myself I could not tell Yusuf what made it so, so that we could not avoid it.” 

From the other side of the fire, most of her attention focussed on any movement from outside the ring of light their fire provided, Quynh noticed the way Andromache's fingers twitched as if they wanted to curl protectively around the back of Nicolò’s head. 

“You know now,” she said instead. 

Nicolò nodded slowly. “Yes, or...it has been, perhaps five years since  _ that  _ happened. I thought...I was hopeful there were only nightmares left.”

“You have had more nightmares as of late,” Andromache observed.

Nicolò hesitated but nodded jerkily. It took him even longer to speak. 

“I...don’t like pain,” Nicolò said haltingly, his shoulders slumping as if he was about to confess some desperate sin. “I don’t like being in pain.”

Yusuf was holding his breath; Nicolò looked the picture of misery. Andromache met Quynh’s eyes across the fire. They did not have to speak of it, Quynh knew Andromache’s thoughts as if they were her own: No more. It did not matter if it was how Andromache had been taught, when mortal, so long ago that she could only half remember it or that Quynh had thrived under that same method. It did not matter that Lykon had taken to it laughing. 

Nicolò could not be corrected with a blow or a stinging cut, just enough to feel. Even if he had not spoken, Quynh knew she had lost the taste for it. And if it was not for Nicolò, it could not be for Yusuf, the first thing Andromache had learned of him was to read the flinch that could only be seen in Nicolò’s eyes when Yusuf suffered blows he did not. 

Andromache’s fingers ran over Nicolò’s hair; Yusuf exhaled. 

“You will not suffer anymore blows from us,” Quynh said, her eyes still mostly on the dark landscape surrounding them. 

From the corner of her eye, she saw Yusuf smile. 

“You would never have, if we had known,” Andromache confirmed. 

Nicolò sagged, Quynh was not sure if it was from regret or relief. Yusuf’s fingers tightened around him. Andromache’s hand did curl around the back of Nicolò’s neck, then. As if between the two of them, they were buffering him against a storm. 

Quynh thought they underestimated him. Or perhaps she did. Perhaps just because he did not  _ need  _ the comfort, he would still enjoy it in the way she did not care for. 

“It was a long time ago,” Nicolò said, self-loathing in his voice. 

Yusuf made a noise from where he lay, objecting. Nicolò froze and looked down at him, apologetic. Quynh wondered how many times they had spoken of it before, how many times Yusuf had had to speak up so Nicolò would not be too harsh with himself. 

“How long?” Andromache asked. “How long exactly?”

“37 years,” Nicolò answered immediately. 

Andromache’s fingers curled gently in the small hairs at the back of his neck to take the sting out of her words. “Until you have to pause and think about  _ how  _ long, it will not be long ago. Not to you.”

Nicolò exhaled as if a breath had been punched out of him. Yusuf shifted, just slightly, but enough for Quynh to know he had opened his eyes. Nicolò looked down at him and his face softened.

“Yusuf has been my confessor,” Nicolò said, quietly, with such love in his voice it nearly stole Quynh’s breath away. “He has been the one to...to call me back to myself, when I could not. He is the one who got me to speak so we could figure out what pulled me away to begin with.”

Nicolò’s other hand fell to Yusuf’s face, utterly tender, tracing the line of his cheek. His eyes were shining, so were Yusuf’s. Yusuf turned his face to kiss Nicolò’s fingers. 

“Nicolò’s own bravery has gotten him thus far,” Yusuf said firmly. “I only helped him find a path he could walk, he had to walk it.”

“And,” Yusuf added, looking Nicolò straight in the eyes, as if to impress the point upon him. “They were going to take one of us. I do not forget that he ensured it was  _ him  _ so I would be spared what he suffered.”

“How could I have not spared my heart from such things?” Nicolò whispered. “I would do it again and only thank God it was not you.”

Quynh met Andromache’s eyes across the fire. Andromache gave her a wry grin. They had never been so  _ soft  _ with each other, never been given to poetry. 

But she knew in this, their hearts beat the same.  _ If one of us must suffer _ , she had thought before, she would think again until her mouth filled with rust and saltwater and she did not live long enough between living and dying to think anything at all,  _ let it be me. _ )

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nicky is close to starving to death in this, and he, Joe and Quynh discuss starving to death. It's all involuntary. 
> 
> There's no graphic depiction of kids dying but they talk about it. 
> 
> In the Coda to the Coda, Nicky has a flashback as part of his PTSD, which they obviously don't call that, and there's discussion of it.
> 
> Both Nicky and Quynh discuss being suicidal and that they made suicide attempts that did not work because immortal. 
> 
> And the Black Death happens and in COVID times some people might not want to read about that. 
> 
> I'm going to be posting two chapters at a time for each update. There is no update schedule, sorry!
> 
> Thank you onewordnoe for the EXCELLENT beta!


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